Interview and Interdisciplinary Issue Identification
Collaborative healthcare paradigms remain a quality enhancement measure in care provision. Despite their effectiveness in improving clinical outcomes, these approaches have had a fair share of challenges in their integration into traditional mainstream care. These challenges are attributable to the complexities around their implementation. Liu et al. (2021) demonstrate several barriers to implementing interdisciplinary communication and collaboration during care provision and outline the need to identify and eliminate these barriers. This paper reports an interview with Ms. Carol, a lead nurse at Southwest Hospital, on issues affecting the hospital.
Interview Focused on Past and Current Issues
Ms. Carol is a senior nurse at Southwest Hospital with a 30-year of nursing experience in various care institutions. She assumed the duty of nurse leader at the hospital eight years ago and is currently in charge. Her duties are oversight, organizing continuous medical education for all nurses, implementing policies and procedures, and guiding other nurses. Ms. Carol notes that before she assumed leadership, the hospital had been experiencing several quality compromises that were taking a toll on the hospital’s operational efficiencies and finances. These compromises were on medical and medication errors, poor coordination between healthcare providers, the ineffective flow of patient information, poor clinical outcomes, and the privacy of patient data. She explains that the hospital implemented several changes in its operationalization that enabled the resolution of these quality compromises. These changes include integrating adequate electronic health records, shifting to collaborative care provision paradigms, and recruiting more staff. She further explains that the changes were not easy initially but have since been accepted by most staff members. The staff members have since embraced these changes. Ms. Carol narrates that she first had experience with the interdisciplinary collaborative approach in a hospital where she used to work before moving to Southwest Hospital. She lauds the effectiveness of the multidisciplinary approach in enhancing clinical outcomes and improving the quality of care provision.
Issues Identification
Several issues are apparent in the interview that an evidence-based interdisciplinary approach can solve. These issues include poor coordination between individual healthcare professionals during care processes, medical and medication errors, and inadequate care outcomes. A multidisciplinary approach to care provision draws various healthcare professionals and synergizes their activities toward enhancing patient outcomes. This approach requires multiple healthcare professionals to work together to design treatment plans for the patients, treat them, and monitor their outcomes. The interdisciplinary approach remains effective in minimizing medical and medication errors and improving clinical outcomes, providing a framework for oversight, cooperation, and information sharing (Spaulding et al., 2019). The overall effect is seen in improved care outcomes and quality enhancement during care processes.
Potential Change Theories and Leadership Strategies
Several change theories have been developed that provide a framework for implementing organizational change processes. Kotter’s change management theory is a theoretical model that can be used to create an interdisciplinary solution to an administrative issue. Kotter’s change model is based on the fundamental that people have the propensity to resist change and that implementing change processes requires the instigator of the change to tailor the psychology of these members towards the change process (Carman et al., 2019). This theoretical model outlines an 8-step process for implementing change processes in healthcare. These are creating a sense of urgency, building a change team, defining a strategic vision, communicating the change, identifying and addressing barriers to the change process, creating short-term goals, implementing the change, and maintaining the chang-essentials play an essential role in organizational change processes. These include prioritizing the people involved with the change by making sure they are aware of the change processes, choosing and working with a change model to implement organizational change processes, and empowering the subjects with the provisions of the change by communicating these provisions to them. Faupel & Süß (2018) reinforce the need for active leadership in organizational change processes. Leaders should inspire their members’ change processes by sparking excitement for the change and making the change process compelling to corporate members.
Collaborative Approaches
Several collaborative approaches can be used to establish or improve the interdisciplinary team to address the healthcare issues identified. Teamwork, mentoring, and staff pairing/grouping are example approaches that foster staff collaborations and sharing responsibilities for decision-making and problem-solving within the healthcare systems. Teamwork creates a system where all healthcare providers establish a ground of commonality in their duties and responsibilities towards the patients. It is an intrinsic feature of collaborative paradigms characterized by trust, mutual respect, cooperation, and collaboration between healthcare providers (Schot et al., 2019). Teamwork is the cornerstone of an interdisciplinary approach that can be used to establish and improve teams to address the identified issues.
As indicated in the interview and literature findings, an interdisciplinary approach is critical in addressing quality issues in healthcare. Medication errors and poor clinical outcomes from hospital staff can be addressed adequately by employing multidisciplinary approaches. Teamwork is an intrinsic feature of the interdisciplinary approach that synergizes healthcare providers toward improving clinical outcomes. Healthcare leaders oversee change processes that integrate the interdisciplinary approach into hospital operationalization.
References
Carman, A., Vanderpool, R., Stradtman, L., & Edmiston, E. (2019). A Change-Management Approach to Closing Care Gaps in a Federally Qualified Health Center: A Rural Kentucky Case Study. Preventing Chronic Disease, 16. https://doi.org/10.5888/pcd16.180589
Faupel, S., & Süß, S. (2018). The Effect of Transformational Leadership on Employees During Organizational Change – An Empirical Analysis. Journal Of Change Management, 19(3), 145-166. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697017.2018.1447006
Liu, P., Lyndon, A., Holl, J., Johnson, J., Bilimoria, K., & Stey, A. (2021). Barriers and facilitators to interdisciplinary communication during consultations: a qualitative study. BMJ Open, 11(9), e046111. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-046111
Schot, E., Tummers, L., & Noordegraaf, M. (2019). I am working on working together. A systematic review of how healthcare professionals contribute to interprofessional collaboration. Journal Of Interprofessional Care, 34(3), 332-342. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2019.1636007
Spaulding, E., Marvel, F., Jacob, E., Rahman, A., Hansen, B., & Hanyok, L. et al. (2019). Interprofessional education and collaboration among healthcare students and professionals: a systematic review and call for action. Journal Of Interprofessional Care, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2019.1697214
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Question 
For this assessment, you will create a 2-4 page report on an interview you have conducted with a health care professional. You will identify an issue from the interview that could be improved with an interdisciplinary approach and review best practices and evidence to address the issue.
Interview and Interdisciplinary Issue Identification
As a baccalaureate-prepared nurse, your participation and leadership in interdisciplinary teams will be vital to the health outcomes of your patients and organization. One way to design an improvement project is by using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement describes it thus:
The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle is shorthand for testing a change in the actual work setting—by planning it, trying it, observing the results, and acting on what is learned. This is the scientific method adapted for action-oriented learning…Essentially, the PDSA cycle helps you test out change ideas on a smaller scale before evaluating the results and making adjustments before potentially launching into a somewhat larger-scale project (n.d.).
You might also recognize that the PDSA cycle resembles the nursing process. The benefit of gaining experience with this project design model is that it allows nurses to ideate and lead improvements. For this assessment, you will not be implementing all of the PDSA cycle. Instead, you are being asked to interview a healthcare professional of your choice to determine what kind of interdisciplinary problem they are experiencing or have experienced in the workplace. In Assessment 2, this interview will inform the research you will conduct to propose a plan for interdisciplinary collaboration in Assessment 3.
It would be an excellent choice to complete the PDSA Cycle activity before developing the report. The activity consists of four questions that create the opportunity to check your understanding of best practices related to each stage of the PDSA cycle. The information gained from completing this formative will promote your success with the Interview and Interdisciplinary Issue Identification report. This will take just a few minutes of your time and is not graded.
Reference
Institute for Healthcare Improvement. (n.d.). How to improve. http://www.ihi.org/resources/Pages/HowtoImprove/default.aspx
Demonstration of Proficiency
Competency 2: Explain how interdisciplinary collaboration can be used to achieve desired patient and system outcomes.
Summarize an interview focused on past or current issues at a healthcare organization.
Describe collaboration approaches from the literature that could be relevant in establishing or improving an interdisciplinary team to address an organizational issue.
Competency 3: Describe ways to incorporate evidence-based practice within an interdisciplinary team.
Identify an issue from an interview for which an evidence-based interdisciplinary approach would be appropriate.
Competency 4: Explain how change management theories and leadership strategies can enable interdisciplinary teams to achieve specific organizational goals.
Describe change theories and a leadership strategy that could help develop an interdisciplinary solution to an organizational issue.
Competency 5: Apply professional, scholarly, evidence-based communication strategies to impact patient, interdisciplinary team, and systems outcomes.
Organize content so ideas flow logically with smooth transitions; contain few errors in grammar/punctuation, word choice, and spelling.
Apply APA formatting to in-text citations and references, exhibiting nearly flawless adherence to APA format.
Professional Context
This assessment will introduce the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) Model to create organizational change. By interviewing a colleague of your choice, you will begin gathering information about an interprofessional collaboration problem that your colleague is experiencing or has experienced. You will identify a change theory and leadership strategies to help solve this problem.
Scenario
This assessment is the first of three related evaluations in which you will gather interview information (Assessment 2), design a proposal for interdisciplinary problem-solving (Assessment 3), and report on how a multidisciplinary improvement plan could be implemented in a place of practice (Assessment 4). At the end of the course, your interviewee will have a proposal plan based on the PDSA cycle that they could present to stakeholders to address an interdisciplinary problem in the workplace.
For this assessment, you will need to interview a healthcare professional such as a fellow learner, nursing colleague, administrator, business partner, or another appropriate person who could provide you with sufficient information regarding an organizational problem that they are experiencing or have experienced, or an area where they are seeking improvements. Consult the Interview Guide [DOCX] for an outline of how to prepare and the types of information you will need to complete this project successfully.
Remember: this is just the first in a series of three assessments.
Instructions
For this assessment, you will report on the information you collected in your interview, analyze the interview data, and identify a past or current issue that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. This could be an issue that has not been addressed by a multidisciplinary approach or one that could benefit from improvements related to the interdisciplinary approach currently being used. You will discuss the interview strategy you used to coCitations from the literature should support your strategy. Additionally, you will start laying the foundation for your Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal (Assessment 3) by researching potential change theories, leadership strategies, and collaboration approaches that could be relevant to the issue you have identified. Please review the scoring guide to confirm the specific required elements of this assessment. Note that there are differences between primary, proficient, and distinguished scores.
When submitting your plan, use the Interview and Issue Identification Template [DOCX], which will help you to stay organized and concise. As you complete the template, make sure you use APA format for in-text citations for the evidence and best practices informing your plan, as well as for the reference list at the end.
Additionally, address the following, which corresponds to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. Please study the scoring guide carefully to understand what is needed for a distinguished score.
Summarize an interview focused on past or current issues at a healthcare organization.
Identify an issue from an interview for which an evidence-based interdisciplinary approach would be appropriate.
Describe potential change theories and leadership strategies that could inform an interdisciplinary solution to an organizational issue.
Describe collaboration approaches from the literature that could facilitate establishing or improving an interdisciplinary team to address an organizational issue of evident, logically organized writing, professional writing, with correct grammar and spelling, and using the current APA style.