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Effective interprofessional collaboration is viewed as an essential component for the delivery of quality patient care in increasingly complex clinical environments. Various groups of professionals may have worked as a team on a project, however are perceptions of interprofessional clinicians viewed as collaborative? Moving forward in establishing a model for interprofessional collaboration requires identifying elements of achievement on high functioning patient care units. Correlation of patient satisfaction and perceptions of collaboration provides insight into aspects of successful interprofessional practices.
Purpose:
The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of clinicians’ perceptions of the level of collaboration between disciplines on individual units and to measure correlations between levels of collaboration and patient satisfaction scores on identified units. The study goals are to:
- Describe clinicians’ perceptions of interprofessional collaborative practice within specific patient care units of a large urban hospital.
- Identify the relationships between perceptions of interprofessional collaborative practice and reported patient/family satisfaction scores.
Background and Significance:
In the current healthcare environment, leaders and care providers strive to deliver care that is high quality, safe and patient-centered. The Institute of Medicine (Greiner & Knebel, 2003), and more recently the World Health Organization (Hopkins, 2010) have called for interprofessional collaboration as an essential component for attainment of this type of care delivery. The growing complexity of care delivery challenges professionals in attainment of these delivery goals.
Over two decades ago, Baggs et al (1992) identified an association between interprofessional collaboration and patient outcomes in an intensive care unit. More recently, Schroder et al (2011) have developed a tool to accurately measure practitioners’ perceptions of interprofessional practice, so as to identify professional development needs and related future educational interventions to be addressed.
No study has explored the relationship between perceptions of collaborative practices related to outcome measures, such as patient and family satisfaction scores. Exploring the association between interprofessional collaboration and patient outcomes is essential to promoting effective models of collaboration in interprofessional practice. To address the gap in the literature, this study focuses on clinicians’ perceptions of collaboration on individual units and its correlation with patient and family perceptions of collaboration.
Study Design:
An academic pediatric hospital in the northeastern United States begins the process of assessing the status of collaboration on selected patient care units and determining what is desirable to increase the quality of overall collaborative care practices. Interprofessional clinicians are defined as those individuals who have a direct impact on patient care operations. Interprofessional clinicians on randomly chosen units within selected areas of service were chosen to participate in this study. The Collaborative Practice Assessment Test (CPAT ©) [Schroder et al. 2011] scores are correlated with selected items from the Press Ganey® survey, a measure of patient/family satisfaction, within the timeframe corresponding to the completion of surveys. Descriptive statistics describe interprofessional participant and basic patient/family basic demographics, as well as results of CPAT © survey responses. A correlational analysis provides data examining relationships among the CPAT© unit aggregate scores and selected items from each unit’s aggregate Press Ganey® patient satisfaction survey scores. Results of this study will be used to develop practices that further enhance interprofessional practices and improve patient/family outcomes.