Blog Post

Patients Do Better When Care Teams Collaborate

But Professionals Must Learn from Each Other to Bond as a Team

December 18, 2024

By:

Tamara Cadet, PhD, MPH

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Everyone wants better patient outcomes—the patient, the provider, and the health system—yet no one discipline can do it alone. A wealth of research indicates that interprofessional collaboration leads to positive health outcomes, from reducing complications for hospitalized patients fed intravenously (Naylor et al., 2004) to decreasing deaths from heart failure (Holland et al., 2005; McAlister et al., 2004).

If we want to keep improving health outcomes, we need a workforce trained to collaborate in interprofessional teams. According to the World Health Organization, we need interprofessional education (IPE) interventions “when students from two or more professions learn about, from, and with each other.” (WHO, 2010) The IPE interventions include an educational component, such as seminars and workshops as opposed to professionals from diverse disciplines collaborating in real time to provide specialized expertise.

A 2018 study published in Intensive and Critical Care Nursing developed a standardized interdisciplinary format where team members met daily for a patient case presentation by a surgery resident followed by input from a bedside nurse and a respiratory therapist.

The health system will be unable to keep pace with explosive changes unless it moves to a team-based model. But the delivery system cannot make that shift effectively until the education system begins to train new health professionals in collaborative practice (HRSA, 2011).

If the goals of IPE interventions are to help prepare current and future professionals for team-based care and improve patient care, we need to know the impact of IPE interventions on patient outcomes. In our recent Journal of Interprofessional Care study, our team’s scoping review is the first to summarize the evidence linking IPE interventions to improving safe and effective patient care. Our findings reinforce the need to keep supporting interprofessional collaboration.

The studies we evaluated included professionals, students, or practitioners from at least two disciplines who had completed IPE or training. We learned that:

95% reported a rise in patient satisfaction and patient or patient/caregiver education
77% reported a decline in medical errors
67% reported a drop in lengths of stay
50% reported a decrease in mortality

These findings support the idea that IPE interventions can improve patient outcomes. We do better when we involve students—the next generation—who were underrepresented in the studies we reviewed. We also do better by involving all disciplines. Medicine and nursing professionals were well represented in the IPE interventions with pharmacy and social work professionals lagging and other disciplines highly underrepresented.

As a researcher and educator interested in patient outcomes, I believe it’s critical to conduct research and implement the outcomes to make a difference. My interest in this work is based on both practice and research experiences where I’ve seen the need for social work involvement in team-based care.

Further, as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Committee on Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care, I see the growing importance of interprofessional collaboration.

To improve patient care, we need to:

Encourage grand rounds with two or more disciplines presenting (including students and underrepresented professions)
Change the health professional educational curriculum requirements to include IPE
Standardize reproducible IPE interventions
Include students and underrepresented professions in IPE interventions
Conduct research to understand the impact of IPE collaborations with underrepresented professions and novel partnerships
Consider involving professionals from various disciplines when solving major health care problems and show payors that team-based care improved patient outcomes
Identify collaborative efforts being used and ask how to get involved

We need to be intentional about our efforts to document for all professions and collaborate effectively.

I am reminded of an occasion when I was an observer during an end-of-life patient simulation with students from pharmacy, medicine, and social work fields. The medical student conducted their assessment and reviewed the case along with the pharmacy student and social worker. They asked questions about logistics and emotional needs after talking with the patient and the family. The social worker handled the conversation. During the debrief, the medical student said, “Thank God for you, the social worker; I did not know how to handle that part of the situation and while the circumstances are sad, we have a patient and a family that feel heard and are ok with their decision.” This shows the power of team-based care and how participants learn from one another. It is critical that we implement and evaluate IPE interventions so we have examples like this that will benefit our patients.

The study, “Describing the Evidence Linking Interprofessional Education Interventions to Improving the Delivery of Safe and Effective Patient Care: A Scoping Review,” was published on December 20, 2023, in the Journal of Interprofessional Care. Authors include Tamara Cadet, Joseph Cusimano, Shelley McKeearney, Julie Honaker, Cynthia O’Neal, Reza Taheri, Virginia Uhley, Yingting Zhang, Margaret Dreker, and Judith S. Cohn.