Improving hospital care and collaborative communications for the 21st century: Key recommendations for general internal medicine
BACKGROUND: Communication and collaboration failures can have negative impacts on the efficiency of both individual clinicians and health care system delivery as well as on the quality of patient care. Recognizing the problems associated with clinical and collaboration communication, health care professionals and organizations alike have begun to look at alternative communication technologies to address some of these inefficiencies and to improve interprofessional collaboration.
Interprofessional communication with hospitalist and consultant physicians in general internal medicine: A qualitative study
BACKGROUND: Studies in General Internal Medicine [GIM] settings have shown that optimizing interprofessional communication is important, yet complex and challenging. While the physician is integral to interprofessional work in GIM there are often communication barriers in place that impact perceptions and experiences with the quality and quantity of their communication with other team members.
An evaluation of the use of smartphones to communicate between clinicians: A mixed-methods study
BACKGROUND: Communication between clinicians is critical to providing quality patient care but is often hampered by limitations of current systems. Smartphones such as BlackBerrys may improve communication, but studies of these technologies have been limited to date.
OBJECTIVE: Our objectives were to describe how smartphones were adopted for clinical communication within general internal medical wards and determine their impact on team effectiveness and communication.
Assessment of interprofessional learning: The design of an interprofessional objective structured clinical examination (iOSCE) approach
Despite the broad adoption of IPE across a number of educational institutions, in general, there continues to be little focus on the development and implementation of sound assessment strategies.
Interprofessional primary care protocols: A strategy to promote an evidence-based approach to teamwork and the delivery of care
Primary care reform involving interprofessional team-based care is a global phenomenon. In Ontario, Canada, 150 Family Health Teams (FHTs) have been approved in the past few years. The transition to a FHT is complex involving many changes and the processes for collaborative teamwork are not clearly delineated. To support the transition to team-based care in FHTs, a project was undertaken to develop and implement a series of interprofessional protocols in four clinical areas.
Interprofessional collaboration in family health teams: An Ontario-based study
OBJECTIVE: To examine family health team (FHT) members' perspectives and experiences of interprofessional collaboration and perceived benefits.
DESIGN: Qualitative case study using semistructured interviews.
SETTING: Fourteen FHTs in urban and rural Ontario.
PARTICIPANTS: Purposeful sample of the members of 14 FHTs, including family physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, dietitians, social workers, pharmacists, and managers.
Nurse-physician relations and quality of nursing care: Findings from a national survey of nurses
This article investigates the association between nurse-physician working relations and nurse-rated quality of nursing team care.The analysis is based on a nationally representative sample of registered nurses working in Canadian hospitals. Multiple logistic regression was used to examine the association between the quality of nurse-physician working relations and nurses' reports of fair or poor nursing team care on the last shift worked.
An intervention to improve interprofessional collaboration and communications: A comparative qualitative study
Interprofessional communication and collaboration are promoted by policymakers as fundamental building blocks for improving patient safety and meeting the demands of increasingly complex care. This paper reports qualitative findings of an interprofessional intervention designed to improve communication and collaboration between different professions in general internal medicine (GIM) hospital wards in Canada.
Leadership of interprofessional health and social care teams: A socio-historical analysis
AIM: The aim of this paper is to explore some of the key socio-historical issues related to the leadership of interprofessional teams.
BACKGROUND: Over the past quarter of a century, there have been repeated calls for collaboration to help improve the delivery of care. Interprofessional teamwork is regarded as a key approach to delivering high-quality, safe care.
The effectiveness of interprofessional education: Key findings from a new systematic review
Over the past decade systematic reviews of interprofessional education (IPE) have provided a more informed understanding of the effects of this type of education. This paper contributes to this literature by reporting an update of a Cochrane systematic review published in this journal ten years ago (Zwarenstein et al., 1999 ). In updating this initial review, our current work involved searches of a number of electronic databases from 1999-2006, as well as reference lists, books, conference proceedings and websites.