Interprofessional Collaboration and Education: Making an Ideal a Reality

Photo courtesty of Penn Medicine. Photo courtesty of Penn Medicine.

We hear a lot about interprofessional collaboration, the potentially dynamic and enlightening process of sharing knowledge across disciplines to improve patient care, but what’s being done to make this a reality?

The promotion of interprofessional collaboration is one focus of an ongoing national initiative by the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, as described in “Interprofessional Collaboration and Education,” an article in the March issue of AJN.

To close the gap between policy bullet points and the reality of daily work for nurses is neither impossible nor inevitable; it depends on smaller coalitions and the engagement of multiple organizations—but also, one imagines, a willingness to engage in inquiry and to try new and imperfect processes at the local level that may need refinement over time. The article is free, but here are a couple of paragraphs that give an a good overview of why it matters and where we are:

Interprofessional collaboration is based on the premise that when providers and patients communicate and consider each other’s unique perspective, they can better address the multiple factors that influence the health of individuals, families, and communities. No one provider can do all of this alone.

However, shifting the culture of health care away from the “silo” system, in which […]

2016-11-21T13:02:49-05:00March 25th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|0 Comments
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The Nursing Report That Didn’t Just ‘Sit on a Shelf’

Joyce Pulcini is director of the master’s programs and of community and global initiatives at the George Washington University School of Nursing in Washington, DC. She also is the contributing editor for AJN’s Policy and Politics column.

From otisarchives4, via Flickr From otisarchives4, via Flickr

IOM speakers and panel focus on a major report’s increasingly visible real world effects—while emphasizing diversity and the roles of every type of nurse at every level.

On December 11, I attended the Institute of Medicine (IOM) event celebrating the three-year anniversary of the The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health report, released in 2010. The event at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, highlighted the impact of the report so far and discussed the continued work of the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action in terms of priorities for the nursing profession.

Some highlights:

2016-11-21T13:05:49-05:00December 18th, 2013|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Into the Alabama Tornado Zone: First Dispatches from a Red Cross Volunteer

Last summer, Susan Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, wrote a series of posts for this blog as she spent her summer vacation  retracing the steps of Florence Nightingale in England and Turkey. Now she’s gone to Alabama as a Red Cross volunteer in the wake of a series of devastating tornadoes. You can read Susan’s daily on-the-go entries here. The accounts from the first two days—of her family’s history with the Red Cross in other disasters, and of arriving and settling in to less-than-ideal sleeping arrangements—are below. New updates (some of it quite moving and disturbing) will soon follow, and all updates will be collected on a separate page for easy reference.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor
Sue Hassmiller

Monday, May 2: Duty calls
I have been involved with the Red Cross for 36 years now, ever since the organization helped me find my parents when they were victims of an earthquake while vacationing in Mexico City. It was the day my parents made it home safely that I made a silent pledge to myself that I would find a way to repay my gratitude to this wonderful organization. As a young nurse, I signed up with the Red Cross in my college town of Tallahassee. I went on quite a few disasters in my single days, but these days, […]

2016-11-21T13:13:17-05:00May 6th, 2011|Nursing|5 Comments
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On the Road to the International Council of Nurses Conference in Malta

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

So I’m on my way to Valletta, Malta (Malta is a small Southern European country in the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and North Africa and a five-hour ferry ride from Libya) for the International Council of Nurses (ICN) meeting. Since there’s no direct flight from my usual airport (Newark, New Jersey) to Malta, it was a no-brainer to go through Paris (April, Paris?) and stop there for a few days. I hadn’t been to Paris before—it was everything I thought it would be, and more. And its reputation as the “City of Light” is well deserved (see the photo of the Eiffel Tower at night, courtesy of my husband).  

This will be my third ICN meeting—I attended the centennial meeting in London, and then one a few years later in Copenhagen. It’s amazing to meet nurses from all over the world, many of whom are grappling with issues similar to those confronting us.

Many, though, are dealing with issues far worse than our own. For example, nurses from sub-Saharan Africa face enormous odds in the face of internal conflicts as well as HIV and AIDS, and nurses in Japan have recently dealt with a series of disasters. These nurses amaze me.

And then there are colleagues who seem to be on the same […]

2016-11-21T13:13:21-05:00May 2nd, 2011|Nursing|1 Comment
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Gallup Poll: Power Elite Believes Nurses Should Have More Say in Policy, Management

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Last week I attended a press conference in Washington, D.C., where the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) released a Gallup poll it had commissioned to find out what 1,500 opinion leaders (or as Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport put it, “the people who run things in this country”) think about nursing leadership and nurses’ influence on health care reform. 

It’s no surprise that most (69%) see nurses as having little influence on health reform. Nurses ranked at the very bottom—immediately below patients, who were below physicians in the rankings. Mary Naylor, an innovative leader from the University of Pennsylvania and part of a reaction panel, hit the nail on the head: “Everyone should be concerned that the largest group of health care providers and the consumers are the least influential.” (Those seen as having the greatest influence are government officials and insurance executives—no surprise there, either.)

In identifying what impedes nurses’ ability to be in leadership roles, here’s how the opinion leaders weighed-in:

2016-11-21T13:19:52-05:00January 25th, 2010|career, health care policy, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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