Essential VII:
Interprofessional Collaboration for Improving Patient and Population Health Outcomes
I have been so blessed in this program with my classmates. The seven of us have been together then entire program. I feel like that is a little unheard of. I know we have forged relationships that will last long into our careers. We have leaned on one another spiritually as well as professionally. We have worked long hours together over the last two years on different projects. We naturally gravitated to each other's strengths and passions. If one of us were the computer guru, we let that classmate organize our thoughts using technology. If one of us loved to gather data and another loved to polish the content; we flowed into our natural skill set and got it done.
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The collaboration we have experienced in this program as well as in our own careers has been evident in our successes and failures. It is imperative for a group leader of any project to know how to ask for help, acknowledge when they are over their head, and seek guidance early. Healthcare is doing such a better job at tearing down the silos and working together interprofessionally.
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I got to witness this in action when I attended the SEEDS (South Eastern Educators ---) conference that was held at ------College. The nursing program there has one of the most up to-date simulation labs that I've ever seen. The health sciences programs there actually have lab sessions where nursing, social work, and physical therapy work through scenarios together. A scenario that we discussed was a hospice patient, who's estranged child was at the bedside, the patient's spouse of same sex did not agree with the DNR. This all involved the nursing care, physical therapy working through the social situation, and how case management could intervene. For me this is exactly how we need to be training now and always. We do not take care of the patients by ourselves.