Inter-professional Education will enlighten students, the future health care professionals, to demonstrate and discover the experience on how health care professionals and students acquire the knowledge and skills of working practices to deliver a good standard of care to patients in care settings. It will also allow students and future health care professionals to reflect and communicate effectively as these form the core component of care. Inter professional Education occurs when two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care (CAIPE, 2002). In my own knowledge and understanding, Inter professional practice can be defined as different practitioners working together to deliver effective care to service users.
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The benefits of inter professional practice are collaboration within a team composed of different professionals, the ability to deliver a good standard of care to service users and also an improvement to patient outcomes in health care. Another benefit is it allows different professionals to share information about the patient, and to communicate effectively with the patient to deliver adequate care. For example, Mrs A has just been admitted on a ward with a broken bone. For Mrs A to get the care she requires the nurse and other health professionals such as the radiographers, doctors, pharmacists and the physiotherapists must be able to communicate with each other to deliver a high standard of care.
All this group of professionals will be involve in Mrs A care, the doctor will refer the patient to the x ray department where they will look at what part of the bone is broken, the result would be sent to the doctor who would diagnose Mrs A by prescribing her some medication and the treatment she will need. A pharmacist will then dispense the medication that she had been prescribed and finally, the physiotherapy will help Mrs A to recover by encouraging her to use different method of exercise. The benefits of different professionals working together will improve the quality of care given to the patient and will also allow her needs to be supported efficiently. If different group of professionals do not communicate together effectively this can lead to the patient not getting efficient care.
Professional roles in health and social care sectors include different professionals such as Nurses (Adult, Learning Disability, Mental Health and Child Nurses), radiographers, pharmacists, physiotherapists and social workers participating in a patient’s care. The chosen profession that will be described is Adult Nursing. The role of an adult nurse is to care for patients aged 18 till end of their life. These patients could be suffering from a range of illnesses/diseases such as acute illness meaning short term illnesses such as stomach ache or measles. On the other hand chronic illnesses are long term illnesses such as stroke, cancer and osteoporosis.
Nurses usually work within a team and they are the primary contact for patients because they provide a continuous care for patients. Adult nurses work in a wide range of settings such as hospitals, community centres, residential homes, care homes, prisons, hospices, schools, rehabilitation centres and much more. Professional principles of nursing is NMC, these principles inform the patients and families as well as the colleagues what is expected from nursing practice. For example nursing staff must treat their patient or patient in their care with dignity, respect, provide choices and always maintain confidentiality to provide adequate care provided to the patients.
patients experiences may be enhanced by inter professional learning if there are good communication skills within the inter-professional team for example if Mr Ali has an appointment to go for an operation and the doctor has pass the information to the nurse on duty that Mr Ali is having the operation which requires him not to eat, it is then the responsibility of the nurse to pass the information to the health professional looking after the patient and make sure the following action takes place and is documented. This is an example of the professionals working together to improve the care of the patient. Some of the outcomes of this team work are the contribution to the patient’s life by empowering them to make their own choices or giving them options. For example if they have any health issues that require treatment for the condition we should allow the patient to choose the method of care they would prefer.
Patient/service users’ needs to be met by respecting their values and wants, maintaining confidentiality and ensuring that their personal information are kept safe, maintaining dignity, asking for their consent before making a decision. Lastly respecting their rights to privacy, and treating them as individual.
Reflection is an act in which an individual examines their experiences, beliefs, values behaviour and knowledge that leads to a new understanding and appreciation of a situation which prompted the reflective process (Boud, Keogh , & Walker 1985). I will use Marks Maran & Roses Reflective Cycle (1997) to help me reflect on what actually happened; what skills were used to deal with the situation and what feelings arose from my experiences. By analysing my current knowledge with what I learnt from the situation (e.g. skills and how to put them into practice on placement) I will be able to improve my skills and performance in caring for future patients in my care.
The analysis and the discussion of this topic will be underlined by using Marks Maran & Roses Reflective Cycle (1997) to aid my reflection. This will then help me to apply what I have learnt from the collaborative learning in the module to my future practice. I will focus on Daisy’s story to discuss the importance of communication in health care settings. According to Betts (2002), communication is defined as a symbolic representation of the thoughts and feelings of the sender which is decoded and interpreted. From my own understanding communication is the exchange of accurate information to interact with others or passing information to others using a verbal technique such as speaking, sign language, writing, facial expression, body language and eye contact.
In the classroom, each team was made up of different health professionals containing a multidisciplinary profession including radiographers, pharmacist, physiotherapist, dieticians, paramedics, social workers and different branches of nurse’s. My group included myself a student nurse, two radiographers, two pharmacists, one dietician, one paramedic as well as three other student nurses. We were given a case scenario to look at within our allocated parties, one of which was to determine what role each member of the multidisciplinary team had within case scenarios given; this gave us a chance to discover the diverse responsibilities of each profession.
My group focused on a scenario called Daisy’s story which was about communication difficulties that she faced during her care from different professionals, this lead to her care being neglected and not given the appropriate care that was vital to her needs from both the health and social care professionals. My team concluded that for a patient to get the best possible care, we all need to communicate effectively because doing this will help the inter professional team improved standard of care given to a patient and also allow us to understand a person or situation to enables us to resolve differences, build trust, respect, and create environments where inspired ideas, problem solving, affection, and caring can thrive.
The Inter professional Capability Framework (2010) displays a ‘collaborative working’ domain which emphasises the importance of the collaborative worker utilising interpersonal skills to promote effective communication. By taking into account the multiplicity of views and ideas from the multidisciplinary team obtains a better outcome for the service user.
When we started with the discussion everyone was listening and also contributing their opinions about daisy scenario, however when one of my colleague was discussing his experience in healthcare setting that helped him to communicate effectively with the patient, another colleague of mine interrupted by saying her own view. This indicated that he was a non-active listener because this contributed to my first colleague forgetting where he stopped, this made me agitated and frustrated because we lost a vital part of the information. Active listening is a technique of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding (Sach, 2006).
The lesson I learnt from this class discussion is to be an active listener by paying close attention to what my patient and colleague have to say, acknowledge what they are saying by putting other concerns aside for the duration of the conversation and also allowing my patients and colleagues to finish voicing their opinion. I think by doing so, this will allow me to improve on certain skills and develop certain aspects of myself such as respecting other people’s opinion. I will apply this skill to my future practices by actively listening and responding to my patients and colleagues for this will allow all the inter-professional team to deliver good standard of care to service users. By paying more attention to what my patients have to say, this helps to eases confusion, anxiety and also helps to eliminate possibilities for mistakes.
Whilst I was talking about the scenario in which the professionals, the paramedics failed to arrive on time to the scene where Daisy fell by going to the wrong address without carry out the appropriate check for the right address. I realise that the other group was talking over us whilst we were trying to discuss our views on the topic. Some of my colleagues expressed their opinion through their facial expression by looking confused and turning away from my group by their body language, which showed that they were not pleased with the situation. This made me become frustrated and also kept me thinking about the cause of the action, asking myself a question if it was my language, on reflection, I need to be more conscious of the diverse patients who may come in my care and respect their preference of their chosen communication. An example of this is when I am speaking to my patients I must speak clearly, brief and avoid the use of jargon which cannot be understood. According to Zanten, Boulet, Norcini, & McKinley (2005) it is good to avoid the use of jargon in counseling to promote patient participation and avoid difficulties for the patient to follow simple procedures.
I need to improve myself when working as a student nurse to be able to communicate effectively without any barriers so as to deliver a good standard of care to my patient and when working with other professionals within a team. Jasper (2003) explains that our experiences act as a springboard for developing new skills. This is supported by Baird & Winter (2005) who contributed that knowledge and abilities are generalised to assimilated new situations and values to enhance inter-professional. I observed in my case that during our discussions in my inter-professional team there was some aspect of my communication skills that require room for improvement such as my tone of voice and how to control my temper.
Having good communication skills are essential for delivering efficient care, by achieving this I need to put into practice what I have learnt through the inter professional group discussion. I also need to improve on my understanding of others because according to Webster (2002), many skills and knowledge within the team involves not only understanding one’s role and values, but also the other members. For example, briefly reading on other professionals’ roles that I will be working with to gain an understanding and insight of what their job entails.
In conclusion, this essay has analysed and discussed my participation in this module by using Marks Maran & Roses Reflective Cycle (1997) model of reflection to reflect on the skill and knowledge gained from working collaboratively with other professionals. This will improve my approach to high-quality verbal interaction; enable me to become a more effective communicator so I will be able to provide better care to patients now and in the future.
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Baird, M. & Winter, J. (2005) Reflection, practice and clinical education: Professional Supervision & Mentoring, Philadelphia: Elsevier Churchill Livingstone, P 156
Betts, A. (2002). What is communicator. (3rd ed.). Neil Kenworth, Gillian Snowley and Cynthia Gilling. Common foundation studies in nursing. (pp 253-277). London: Churchill Livingstone.
Boud D. Keogh T, and Walker D. (1985) Reflection, turning experience into learning. Billing, Worcester
Centre for the advancement of Inter professional Education (CAIPE), (2002). The Definition and Principles of Inter professional Education: Defining Inter professional Education. Retrieved on 28th Nov 2012 from: http://www.caipe.org.uk/about-us/the-definition-and-principles-of-interprofessional-education/
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