Importance of professional communication and team collaborations between medical fraternity

In the words of Alexander Graham Bell ‘’Great discoveries and improvements, invariably involve the cooperation of many minds’’.

Collaboration in Healthcare in the modern day is more a team sport than a single man’s game. The World Health Organization defines Inter-professional collaboration in healthcare as the act of having multiple healthcare workers come together from varied professional backgrounds, to work closely with patients, families, caregivers and the community towards delivering the highest quality of care. Rapid advancements in the field of medicine, has also led to making the medical care teams very crowded, this in turn in is reiterating the importance of promoting interpersonal collaboration in healthcare today. Let’s understand how healthcare can be benefited from interpersonal collaboration.

Clear and Meaningful Communication

Clear and meaningful professional communication eliminates the possibilities of miscommunication. In healthcare miscommunication can lead to highly costly consequences, like conducting an incorrect diagnosis or overlooking symptoms. Clinical communication is therefore very important for reducing preventable adverse drug reactions, decreasing mortality rates, and for the optimization of medical dosages.

Efficient and Flexible Teams

Professional communication in healthcare reduces medical errors, improves patient experience, and fastens the process of delivering better patient outcomes, besides reducing the operational expense of hospitals. Regular team meetings and group care planning sessions helps set expectations, clarifies responsibilities, keeps team members in the know of what the other member is doing and assists them if need be. The trust and understanding developed from such face to face interactions improves decision making and boosts up team work.

Improved Decision-Making

Collaborative decision making in healthcare is very vital for considering and opining on critical matters factoring in the different perspectives. When opinions are factored in from different point of views it helps formulate better treatment action plans based on not just the symptoms but individual needs of the patient as well.

Experience of the patient

Any patient that enters the hospital comes in contact with a series of people namely in-house doctors, specialists, radiologists, nurses, caregivers, dieticians and physiotherapists. Each of these people has a unique perspective and brings to the table valuable insights about the patient. When these entities work together patient care is looked at from a more comprehensive and holistic point of view. Collaboration among these entities in real-time is what makes or breaks the patient care experience. Many hospitals today encourage the practice of team-based patient centred rounds; this team includes the primary doctor, specialised doctors, and nurses among others. This not only fosters patient centric care but promotes professional collaboration too.

Make Patient Care a Proactive Group Effort

Patient care requires a comprehensive approach towards making each team member on the medical board be heard, respected and valued. Doctors or caregivers cannot work in isolation to suggest what best works for the patient. Each member of the inter-disciplinary team must provide insights to the best of their knowledge and skills eliminating the scope for ideas to either collide or overlap. A clear channel of clinical communication technology makes is all about getting the right inputs and the right time to make patient care plans more time efficient.

Healthcare is but a partnership, a partnership between doctors, doctors and nurses and the entire community of medicine with that of the patients based on trust, knowledge, instincts, and insights.