Interprofessional Collaborative Practice And Relational Coordination

Conflict and Change Management: Ch.14 & 19 The article being discussed is “Interprofessional collaborative practice and relational coordination: Improving healthcare through relationships” by Jody Hoffer Gittell, Marjorie Godfrey, and Jill Thistlethwaite. The article focuses on interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP) and relational coordination (relational coordination) and discusses the commonalities between the two when it comes to the “provision of the best possible care through optimal communication between all participants involved in that care including professionals and support staff as well as patients and their families” (Thistlethwaite, 2014). Relational coordination is defined as a process that reinforces relational coordination

According to the Jill Thistlethwaite the three challenges that are addressed throughout the article are achieving high quality cost-effective care, achieving person or relationship centered care, and learning to work better together through redesigning professional education. It discusses how to integrate these two theories into the three challenges listed above. By integrating the two theories into achieving high-quality cost-effective care, we can learn that relational coordination can provide tools to evaluate baseline relational coordination and result in new relational coordination dynamics. This can result in new ways to educate physicians and from interventions, provide a way to assess the impact of relational coordination on critical performance outcomes, and information the transformation of healthcare systems to support the new patters of relational coordination. Next, integrating this into person and relationship-centered care can promote improvement in relationships between the provider and their patients. Lastly, integrating relational coordination into learning together to work together can provide the tools needed to assess the impact of

Many of the times we go into change and train (education) but there is always a resistance and we always struggle with and we can never measure it correctly to show the effectiveness of our trainings and process improvements. Chapter 19 explains the resistance to change and I think in today’s world this will be a huge concept to understand when leading a healthcare organization. Healthcare for many years has been said to be “old school” and it has in many ways when it comes to the culture. As leaders, we first have to learn how to adapt to change ourselves, learn the tools that are needed to drive this change, and then ensure the organizations voice is heard and inputted into these changes. Using chapter 19 tools and theories can help drive that change effectively. The five critical elements that are needed for a successful transformation of a healthcare organization as outline by Ritter are strong impetus to change, leadership commitment to quality, improvement initiatives that actively engage staff in meaningful problem solving, alignment to achieve consistency of organization goals with resource allocation and actions, and integration to bridge traditional intraorganizational boundaries among individual competence. Where I have been working now, I can see each of these elements unfolding at IU Health but I know it sounds easier than it is. This work takes years but through these theories I