The Long Way Toward Cooperation

Abstract

To better understand why cooperation between health care professionals is still often problematic, we carried out 25 semistructured face-to-face expert interviews with physicians and nurses in different rural and urban areas in northern Germany. Using Mayring’s qualitative content analysis method to analyze the data collected, we found that doctors and nurses interpreted interprofessional conflicts differently. Nursing seems to be caught in a paradoxical situation: An increasing emphasis is placed on achieving interprofessional cooperation but the core areas of nursing practice are subject to increasing rationalization in the current climate of health care marketization. The subsequent and systematic devaluation of nursing work makes it difficult for physicians to acknowledge nurses’ expertise. We suggest that to ameliorate interprofessional cooperation, nursing must insist on its own logic of action thereby promoting its professionalization; interprofessional cooperation cannot take place until nursing work is valued by all members of the health care system.

The current status of nurses–doctors collaboration in clinical decision and its outcome in Tanzania

“…Nurses are ignored in decision-making because they are regarded to have no authority (Johnson, 2009;Murata, 2014) and are considered as tools for carrying out MD's orders (Fagin & Garelick, 2004 Barlem, & Marcelino, 2016;Vaartio, 2008). The impression of poor educational background of nurses by MDs is also in line with another study where MDs only acknowledged nurses who were experts in wound management and yet regarded that as a simple task (Foth et al, 2015). However, studies have reported that nurses are competent in their various areas of training and are knowledgeable and skilful for patient holistic care (Kvande et al, 2017;TNMC, 2014).…”

“…This conforms to another study that reported same because nurses were tired of their opinions been ignored. Nurses added or reduced the dosages of medications contrary to the orders given by MDs and sometimes avoided administering the medications outright (Foth et al, 2015).…”

“…Collaboration is essential in clinical practice; particularly, it increases health workers motivation, reduces treatment errors, increases effective care and reduces the weakness of professional performance (Foth, Block, Stamer, & Schmacke, 2015;Zamanzadeh, Irajpour, Valizadeh, & Shohani, 2014). Generally, collaboration is defined as working with other persons to accomplish the targeted goal/s (Zamanzadeh et al, 2014).…”

Coordination of care for multimorbid patients from the perspective of general practitioners – a qualitative study

“…Furthermore, medical settings, in which physicians and non-medical healthcare professions work together in teams demonstrate improved patient outcomes [10]. A shared definition of goals, cooperative tasks and responsibilities help to enhance patient care [11].…”