As health care is being restructured, health care institutions are recognizing that interdisciplinary collaboration is an essential element of both effective patient care and organizational survival. This paper analyzes self-reported views of actual collaborative activities between 50 pairs of social workers and physicians on a specific shared case in an acute care hospital setting. Through examining the degree of congruence in perspectives of each pair of collaborators, we compare the two professions' views of the collaborative process and outcome. Additionally, each profession's outlook on its own and the other profession's roles and responsibilities in the case is examined. Our findings indicate that many social work and physician collaborators share similar perspectives about many aspects of their joint patient care endeavors. Where there was disagreement within a pair, almost always, it was a social worker selecting or discussing a variable when her physician counterpart did not. Physicians were less likely than their social work counterparts to identify patient/family problems related to adjustment to illness and problems connected to hospital and community resources as well. Social workers were much less satisfied with the collaboration, saw many more things that they or their collaborator could have done differently and even perceived more disagreement about the approach to the case than did their physician collaborators. It is important to understand, empirically, the dynamics of successful collaboration and to assist social workers in becoming influential and effective collaborators with other health professionals.
This article builds on prior analyses of data collected from a qualitative study of 50 pairs of social worker-physician collaborators in. This article presents the elements of a typology of collaborators from both professions developed from those analyses. The typology was also applied to the entire sample and each respondent characterized according to type (traditional, transitional or transformational). Further analysis was done to evaluate the relationships between type and collaborative perspectives. The sample was primarily transitional (56%-58%) and there were more traditional social workers (22%) and transformational doctors (24%) than anticipated. Social workers, as a group, were much less satisfied with the doctors than the doctors were with them although both groups of traditional respondents were the most dissatisfied. Both groups were least transformational in relation to control over decision making.
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