Analysis Of The Canadian Interprofessional Collaboration

As shortages in the health care system continually increase, the media and government leaders frequently emphasize the problem lies in the lack of health care providers available to manage the system. The Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative (2008) states that the problem is not simply solved by producing and admitting more health professional students, but by “changing the way health services are delivered and the manner in which providers interact with each other” (p. 7). As a future registered nurse going into the largest profession in the health system, I can expect to always be a member of a collaborative team. Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) is the “process of developing and maintaining effective interprofessional working

Under the Health Professions Act (2000) no single profession has exclusivity over their scope of practice, as the act recognizes that professions have overlapping scopes of practice. As a result, “role blurring” may occur with the increase of professional roles and scopes of practice overlapping (Hall, 2005). Role blurring can lead to team members feeling underutilized or over-utilized, both increasing the risk of team conflict and burn-out. Therefore, one of the competency domains of interprofessional collaboration includes role clarification. To decrease role blurring, there must be a clear identification of where unique and shared knowledge and skills occur. Where overlapping occurs, the decision on who to provide care to the patient should be based on who has the most knowledge and skills to meet those needs. This not only allows individuals to practice to their full scope of practice but allows a more distributed workload among the team (CIHC,

Conflicts within the nursing profession may be seen among the different age generations, with senior nurses holding different values than new graduates. For example, there are many cases where horizontal violence and bullying occurs between senior nurses and new nurses. However, in most cases, nurse bullying results from ineffective communication (Sauer, 2012). Interprofessional conflict may occur due to the medical hierarchy and existing profession stereotypes. According to Whitehead (2007), a barrier to physician collaboration is the vision of a ‘flattened hierarchy’ where a physician’s traditional power, decision-making responsibility, and status is reduced. Although these traditional beliefs may still be held among not only physicians but also the public, IPE and IPC allow for the potential of “better communication and development of relationships between health care professions that can be valuable even within a hierarchical system” (Whitehead, 2007, p.