Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Introduction

• Medication errors are preventable occurrences that lead to improper drug use when the drugs are in possession of healthcare professionals or patients.
• Medication errors include the administration of wrong drugs, inappropriate dosages, and the prescription of improper medications.
• These medical errors also occur due to failure to adhere to drug use, gaps in knowledge, technical errors, and improper medical management.
• Medication errors can occur in different settings in the healthcare system, such as drug dispensation or prescription.

Why the Issue is Important

• Medical errors can cause severe physical, psychological and emotional stress to the patient and healthcare provider.
• Medical errors pose significant patient risks, such as life-threatening situations, hospitalization, disability, and congenital disabilities, which are costly to the affected patients.
• Medical errors also contribute to high healthcare costs related to treating drug-related injuries and increased insurance costs.
• Medication errors also affect physicians as they are involved in civil litigations and sometimes criminal charges.

In addition, medical errors also lead to loss of patient trust and disciplinary actions by the medical board.

Relevance of Interdisciplinary Team

• Interdisciplinary collaboration effectively mitigates the risks associated with communication breakdown, the most common cause of medication errors (Manias, 2018).
• The interdisciplinary team should include physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, social workers, and dietitians.
• Medical errors happen due breakdown of communication where multiple physicians prescribe medications administered by nurses.
• Clinical communication is vital but non-existent since the nurses and physicians are rarely in the same room. The interdisciplinary collaborations ensure physicians and nurses hold group conversations that help eliminate medical discrepancies.

How Interdisciplinary Team will Solve the Issue

• Interdisciplinary collaboration helps reduce medication errors since it augments communication during hospital admission and the medical process.
• The interdisciplinary team makes decisions collectively and works together toward improving patients’ outcomes.
• Each team member displays shared responsibility for eliminating medical errors by providing unique insights into the patient’s health.
• The interdisciplinary team identifies different possibilities that the team can discuss to provide high-quality medical care.
• The interdisciplinary team communication thus results in a holistic view of the patient’s condition, thus providing the most appropriate medication and after-care.

Interdisciplinary Team Objective

• The objective of the interdisciplinary team is to improve patient safety through collaborative prescription practices.
• The interdisciplinary collaboration between healthcare professionals will improve prescription practices.
• The revised prescription services will reduce incorrect dosages, and unsafe drug administration practices and increase pharmacological knowledge regarding medication protocols.
• The weak collaboration between physicians, nurses, and pharmacists will be eliminated as they will have to work together to improve patient safety.
• The collaboration between various healthcare departments will reduce the prevalence of medical errors since it reduces diagnoses and medication bias by integrating inputs from team members.

Role of Interdisciplinary Team

• The physician, nurses and pharmacists team will deliberate on the most appropriate drug regimen, thus reducing errors in diagnosis and prescription.
• Physiotherapists collaborate with physicians to prescribe appropriate analgesics and nurses to help administer the medications at suitable intervals.
• Social workers establish a conducive environment for patients to take medications and help with psychosocial healthcare needs.
• Speech pathologists ensure patients are cleared for specific medications,
• Dietitians will be responsible for providing input regarding food-drug interactions. Therefore, collaboration between the interdisciplinary team is vital in ensuring improved patient outcomes.

Plan implementation

• The communication protocols will be developed during consultative meetings where representatives from each sector provide patient diagnoses and medical input (Soares et al., 2021).
• The structured communication guidelines maximize patient safety since there are clear rules regarding communication protocols.
• Each team member has a unique set of skills and healthcare objectives based on experience and education.
• The interpersonal differences between the healthcare professionals can lead to communication breakdown as members try to override each other decisions.
• Therefore, formal training is necessary to ensure team members’ cooperation and introduce effective communication techniques.

Plan Management

• The interdisciplinary collaboration plan can be managed through a clear definition of responsibilities for each team member.
• The team members should elect a team leader to ensure productive patient discussions and maintain decorum in meetings.
• The team leader will develop the consultative structure by identifying objectives and ensuring participation and transparency from each team member.
• The team leader will ensure the effective use of resources by comparing objectives to the services provided.
• The plan involves cooperation between different healthcare departments; thus, each department will increase its expenditure due to the increased workload, such as the increased number of consultative meetings.

Plan Evaluation

• A successful outcome of interdisciplinary collaboration to reduce medical errors would entail safe, patient-centered, and efficient healthcare.
• These outcomes can be measured using the six objectives of patient safety.
• These include avoiding harm to patients, providing services based on scientific knowledge, providing care according to patients’ needs, reducing wait time, avowing wastage of resources and providing healthcare services that do no vary due to patient’s features. These objectives can be measured using parameters such as inpatient length of hospital stay, readmission rates, staff attitudes, rates of adverse drug events, team communication, and medical errors (Derrick, 2018).
• The degree of success is based on improved patient outcomes, a decline in the length of hospital stay, and a decrease in adverse drug events.

Conclusion

• The identified issue entails medication errors in healthcare facility settings.
• Interdisciplinary collaboration effectively mitigates the risks associated with communication breakdown, the most common cause of medication errors.
• The interdisciplinary collaborations ensure physicians and nurses hold group conversations that help eliminate medical discrepancies.
• The interdisciplinary collaboration between healthcare professionals will improve prescription practices since it will reduce incorrect prescriptions and unsafe drug administration practices and increase pharmacological knowledge regarding medication protocols.
• The degree of success is based on improved patient outcomes, a decline in the length of hospital stay, and a decrease in adverse drug events.

References

Derrick, H. (2018) Interdisciplinary healthcare teams. SPNHA Review 14(1). Web.

Manias, E. (2018). Effects of interdisciplinary collaboration in hospitals on medication errors: An integrative review. Expert Opinion on Drug Safety, 17(3), 259-275. Web.

Soares, N., Singhal, S., Kloosterman, C., & Bailey, T. (2021). An Interdisciplinary approach to reducing errors in extracted electronic health record data for research. Perspectives in Health Information Management, 18(1)