DOI: 10.5176/2315-4330_WNC19.264
Authors: Assoc. Prof. Takae Machida
Abstract: Background: With the needs of patients and families who wish for quality, assuring, and safe medical care, and the diversity of medical tasks due to advances in and the complexity of medical care, medical practices has currently been changing from conventional models to team medical care in Japan. Because nurses are engaged in a wide range of tasks in medical settings, from medical checkup and treatment to the assistance of patients in the medical treatment they engage in, they are expected to collaborate with patients, physicians, and other medical staff as the “key person for team medical care” [1].
The roles that nurses are required to play in promoting team medical care are also extremely various, and it is important for team medical care to improve the awareness and skills of individual nurses to enable and effect collaboration. Previous studies reported that there are difficulties in collaboration between nurses and staff in other medical professions due to barriers including the differences in values specific to different medical professionals and the hierarchy comprising physicians [2, 3]. The authors previous study found that physicians give instructions only to nurses they trust and consider reliable, and do not share information with nurses they consider less reliable [4]. In this study, we define team collaboration as the cooperation between nurses and physicians in wards as the key persons, and aim to develop an original scale to evaluate ward team collaboration by examining the elements of the concept hypothesized as factors related to team collaboration by reviewing qualitative studies on team collaboration by the present authors and as reported in previous studies.
Methods: We examined hypothesized elements of the concept from a previous study related to team collaboration reported by the authors [4] as well as from the clinical experience of the authors, and from existing scales and qualitative studies, created an item pool of 153 items, and developed an original scale to evaluate ward team collaboration by conducting brainstorming repeatedly with 20 to 25 nursing administration researchers. Finally, we created an original scale to evaluate ward team collaboration comprised of 29 items.
Keywords: Team collaboration, physicians and nurses, collaboration
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