NURS-FPX4010: Leading People, Processes, and Organizations in Interprofessional Practice ​​​​​​​Collaboration and Reflection

Collaborating interprofessionally creates opportunities for the care team to enhance the quality and safety of patient care. The process reminds nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and others about the need for effective sharing of information and combination of unique perspectives to understand and address patients’ needs. My experience revealed the relevance of interprofessional competence in enabling healthcare professionals to reflect on experiences and actions through evidence-based and patient-centered lenses.

On this day, I was handling four patient including ones with complex symptoms that required more attention. Working on a night shift means that there were few nurses and physicians for timely response to distress calls. During the shift, a patient kept ringing the call bell, which indicated some urgency that required immediate attention. Persistent call bells prompted an intern to intervene. The physician also responded 30 minutes later and help me attend to the patient’s demands. The scenario revealed nurses, physicians, and other professionals’ frontline roles and the need to fulfill duty of care despite complexities in the clinical environment.

Healthcare professionals among them clinical assistants, nurses, and physicians should embrace team-based functions, behavior, and attitudes to help each other in an understaffed or busy health system. Another success factor during the experience was the understanding nature of the intern who responded to distress calls from the patient. However, incidents such as delayed response from the medical team and reluctance to respond to a call bell from uneasy patients limited the group from acting efficiently.

This way, the scenario highlighted the need for effective leadership to allocate tasks efficiently and coordinate activities of the medical team, nurses, and other professionals. The experience also showed the need for excellent communication when handling challenging scenarios. The team on duty understands demand during night shifts and make efforts to help each other in demanding situations. Another take away is the need for shared roles and responsibilities to make everyone responsive to interdisciplinary rounds across the continuum (Mogogolea & Jokonya, 2018). The approach encourages team-based values, behaviors, and attitudes appropriate for encouraging nurses, physicians, clinical assistants, and others to help each other. The shared roles reduce burnout and compassionate fatigue triggered by complexities in the health system.

Reflective nursing practice is an excellent opportunity to understand events in the complex clinical environment and the framework for delivering quality, safe, and cost-effective services. In this regard, it is easier to contextualize patients’ demands and evidence-based strategies for improving patient experiences. Galutira et al. (2018) indicated that reflections highlight the likelihood of things going wrong and the need for informed decisions to create a better clinical environment for the care team and patients. Similarly, reflective practice strengthens resilience towards helping organizations to address common challenges such as medication errors, patient falls, readmissions, and prolonged hospitalization. Further, there are opportunities to identify successes and relevant strategies to maintain efficient and effective practices across the continuum.