Reflective Essay: Inter-professional Issues in Nursing Practice

This reflective essay delves into the multifaceted realm of inter-professional healthcare, focusing on critical issues within nursing practice. The essay examines core challenges like communication gaps, understanding of roles, effective teamwork, and decision-making processes within inter-professional teams. It analyzes these issues through relevant, evidence-based literature and draws upon workshop experiences to illustrate real-world scenarios. The essay emphasizes the impact of these issues on patient safety and the quality of care, highlighting the importance of addressing them. Key findings include the significance of communication skills and the need for enhanced training to improve teamwork and decision-making. The author reflects on personal experiences and suggests strategies for improving inter-professional collaboration, ultimately aiming to enhance patient outcomes and safety. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of effective communication and collaborative skills in providing quality care and maintaining optimal patient safety.

Running head: REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON NURSING PRACTICE
Reflective essay on nursing practice
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

1REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON NURSING PRACTICE
Health care has become increasingly multidimensional in the present scenario; the health
care needs of the patients have become diverse requiring multidimensional care approach from
inter-professional care teams. However, it has to be mentioned on this context, that there are
various different issues that underpin and inter-professional scenario, and the health care is no
exception to that either. This essay will attempt to reflect on different core issues in (IP) inter-
professional health care practice and how it can be overcome taking the aid of the workshop.
This assignment will explore core inter-professional issues such as communication gap,
understanding of different roles and responsibilities, effective team-working and interpersonal
conflict. This assignment will also focus on the analyzing the core interprofessional issues with
respect to current and relevant evidence based literature along with drawing examples from the
workshop activity we had the opportunity to attend.
Inter-professional issues rising in a multidisciplinary healthcare scenario leads to
affecting the patient safety along with the quality of the care, hence these issues hold grave
importance in the context of providing safe and effective care to a patient (Anderson, Gray &
Price, 2017). The first issue selected is the lack of effective communication in the inter-
professional team which is one of the most frequent and reported kind of inter-professional issue
in the health care teams. According to the Allen, Elliott and Jackson (2017), the lack of inter-
professional collaborative practice, especially when related to the effective communication
between the team members, there is a high probability of professional silos and a health care
delivering process that is fragmented affecting the patient safety and effectiveness of the care. In
support, Delunas and Rouse (2014) have stated that the lack pf effective communication among
the health care professionals are the most prominent risk to medical errors and a much elevated
risk to the safety and welfare of the patients. In support the authors have stated that the lack of

2REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON NURSING PRACTICE
effective communication between the members can easily lead to different handover and patient
chart related errors subsequently threatening the health and safety of the patients under care.
Hence it can be stated that this is an issue that impacts the patient safety subsequently with fatal
risk to the patients as, hence I have chosen communication gap to be the first issue in the
assignment. Communication issue is undoubtedly a huge restriction in the path for effective team
work and achievement of subsequent team goals. On a more exploratory note, from my personal
workshop experience, I have noticed that lack of proper communication can easily lead to
negative outcomes for the entire team. In the workshop, we had to prepare a role playing
scenario preparing handover for a patient requiring emergency medical attention. However, all
our team members could not perform effective communication and ended up not being able to
achieve the inter-professional outcome for the workshop. Hence, as directed by the Delunas and
Rouse, (2014), communication gap is a fundamental barrier to effective team work in the health
care scenario and there is need for emphasis on communication skill enhancement training for
the health care staff to avoid communication related mishaps.
The next chosen Inter-professional issue is the team-working capability of each and every
team member of the inter-professional or multidisciplinary care team. As mentioned by the
Manser (2009), the process of providing health care has become inherently interdisciplinary and
as a result a variety of different health care professional belonging to different specialties are
required to work within a team setting and hence adequate team performance is crucial for
ensuring the patient safety and effective care. As mentioned by the Weller, Barrow and
Gasquoine, (2011), the lack of coordination or poor coordination at various levels of
organization has been proved to affect the quality and the safety of the patient care that is being
provided to them. In support, the Currie and White (2012), have stated that the sectors of health

3REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON NURSING PRACTICE
care that is the most affected by the lack of proper coordination and teamworking abilities is the
assessment follow up, laboratory testing and safeguarding the conflicting information. As a
result, teamwork and collaboration have become the sole focus for system based interventions
and improvement of the patient safety and implementation of the medical education standards
(Hull, 2016). Hence, this issue has been chosen as the second core inter-professional issue for
this essay. Reflecting on my own workshop experience the second activity required us to make a
pyramid with paper and balloons in a standing position. With exceptional teamwork skills
exhibited and proper cooperation and collaboration, my team had been able to achieve the IP
outcome for this activity easily. Hence, I would like to state that with proper understanding and
cooperation among each other and establishing a dignified respectful culture in the team can help
in improving the team-working ability and enhance safety and effectiveness of the care provided.
The third selected issue is lack of understanding of the professional roles and
responsibilities between the different members of any inter-professional teams. As explained by
the Suter et al. (2009), collaborative patient centred practice relies heavily on the ability of all of
the members of an inter-professional team to be able to understand their responsibilities and slip
into the required professional roles. Delunas & Rouse (2014), are of the opinion that there is a
significant lack of conceptual clarity among the health care professional regarding their
professional roles and responsibilities. In support, Légaré et al. (2014), have stated that this
active ingredient of collaborative practice is missing in most health care organized due to the
lack of real world practice scenario based training and the wide gap between theory and practice.
As a result, the impact of their inability to understand their job roles and responsibilities leads to
affecting the quality and safety of the care. According to my opinion, from the first activity of
the workshop we were required to match job roles and professional responsibilities. Many of us

4REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON NURSING PRACTICE
did well in that group activity however, we still faced a few doubts and challenges as a few job
roles and responsibilities were nit clear to us. Hence it can be stated that there is need for
coursework initiatives and training to bridge the gap between theory and practice so that we can
provide safe and effective care to the patients.
The last issue is the lack of prompt decision making which is another important issue in
inter-professional teams affecting the safety of care. According to the Légaré et al. (2014), often
the care professionals are faced with emergency situations where prompt decision making among
the inter-professional team is essential to take clinically reasonable actions to save the lives of
the patient. In support, the Currie and White (2012), have stated that lack of prompt decision
making in an inter-professional care team can lead to lack of adequate actions being taken in an
emergency scenarios and resulting in severe exacerbations in the patients. With prompt and
effective decision taken in an emergency situation, the collaborative care goals can easily be
achieved from the workshop experience, as well in the second activity our team was able to take
prompt decisions very easily and each of members performed with adequate emphasis on the
respective tasks which helped us achieve the IP outcomes easily. Hence, without prompt decision
making and shared decision making it is impossible for the any inter-professional team to
function effectively and maintain safe and effective care practices (Allen, Elliott & Jackson,
2017).
On a concluding note, it has to be mentioned that the most important and impactful issue
in an inter-professional care team scenario was discovered to be the communication which
restricted our success in the last and most important activity of the workshop. Effective
communication and interaction skills aid in developing a secure practice framework for proving

5REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON NURSING PRACTICE
quality care and maintaining optimal patient safety; and the inter-professional outcomes from the
workshop such as communication skills, tie management, collaboration and smart distribution of
responsibilities will help me exponentially n the future to perform in a car team with optimal
concern to quality of the care and patient safety. This study had helped me to explore my
communication skills and the drawbacks and I will be able to work on my issues in the future to
build my personal inter-professional communication skills so that it can help me in the future.

6REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON NURSING PRACTICE
References:
Allen, E., Elliott, D., & Jackson, D. (2017). Recognising and responding to in‐hospital clinical
deterioration: an integrative review of interprofessional practice issues. Journal of
clinical nursing. doi: 10.1111/jocn.13839
Anderson, E. S., Gray, R., & Price, K. (2017). Patient safety and interprofessional education: A
report of key issues from two interprofessional workshops. Journal of interprofessional
care, 31(2), 154-163. doi: 10.1080/13561820.2016.1261816
Currie, G., & White, L. (2012). Inter-professional barriers and knowledge brokering in an
organizational context: the case of healthcare. Organization Studies, 33(10), 1333-
1361.doi: 10.1177/0170840612457617
Delunas, L. R., & Rouse, S. (2014). Nursing and medical student attitudes about communication
and collaboration before and after an interprofessional education experience. Nursing
Education Perspectives, 35(2), 100-105. doi: 10.5480/11-716.1
Hull, M. (2016). Medical language proficiency: a discussion of interprofessional language
competencies and potential for patient risk. International journal of nursing studies, 54,
158-172. doi: 10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2015.02.015
Légaré, F., Stacey, D., Brière, N., Robitaille, H., Lord, M. C., Desroches, S., & Drolet, R. (2014).
An interprofessional approach to shared decision making: an exploratory case study with
family caregivers of one IP home care team. BMC geriatrics, 14(1), 83. doi: 10.1186/1471-
2318-14-83.

7REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON NURSING PRACTICE
Manser, T. (2009). Teamwork and patient safety in dynamic domains of healthcare: a review of
the literature. Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica, 53(2), 143-151. doi: 10.1111/j.1399-
6576.2008.01717
Stacks, D. W., & Salwen, M. B. (Eds.). (2014). An integrated approach to communication theory
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Suter, E., Arndt, J., Arthur, N., Parboosingh, J., Taylor, E., & Deutschlander, S. (2009). Role
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practice. Journal of interprofessional care, 23(1), 41-51. doi:
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Weller, J. M., Barrow, M., & Gasquoine, S. (2011). Interprofessional collaboration among junior
doctors and nurses in the hospital setting. Medical education, 45(5), 478-487. doi:
10.1111/j.1365-2923.2010.03919