Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Healthcare - Article Example

?Two Articles on Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Healthcare In this work I reviewed two articles on interdisciplinary collaboration in healthcare.My objective for the review is to deepen my understanding on how interdisciplinary collaboration and teamwork in healthcare may be implemented and the benefits that can be realized from them. The first article I reviewed is a work written by Lisa Bliss, Sylvia Caley and Robert Pettignano. It is not clear what professions the three authors of the article held but it is clear that the first two authors were from the Georgia State University College of Law while the last author or Robert Pettignano was from the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. The article discussed the merits of including lawyers in an interdisciplinary healthcare team and was published in the International Journal of Health, Wellness and Society. In the second article, three medical doctors and two registered nurses narrated an interdisciplinary collaboration in studying how glucose control can be improved in an intensive care unit. This is an article by Ulrike Holzinger, MD, Monika Feldbacher, RN, Adelbert Bachlechner, RN, Reinhard Kitzberger, MD, and Christian Madl, MD. The article was published by the American Journal of Critical Care. The citation page of the International Journal of Health, Wellness and Society describes that journal “is peer-reviewed, supported by the rigorous process of criterion-referenced article ranking and qualitative commentary, ensuring that only intellectual work of the greatest substance and highest significance is published.” In a similar manner, the official website of the American Journal of Critical Care describes the journal in its official website in http://ajcc.aacnjournanls.org as “an official peer-reviewed publication” of the American Critical-Care Nurses. First Article: Adding Lawyers in the Interdisciplinary Team for Healthcare The article highlights the role that a non-medical professional can perform in advancing people’s health. Bliss, Caley and Pettignano noted that there are “non-medical problems that impede access to health care, reduce compliance and potentially exacerbate the original medical problem” (130). Based on this point, the authors emphasized that “employing a holistic, collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to health care by joining lawyers can improve health status, especially for patients from racial or ethnic minority and economically disadvantaged backgrounds who directly are affected by health disparities.” In elaborating on the idea, the authors described the operation of “a partnership among an urban-based pediatric health system, an urban-based legal services organization, and a state university law school” (130). The partnership of the community collaboration has been known as the Health Law Partnership (HeLP). The HeLP operation was deemed important to describe because the authors believe that the partnership and its experience “provide a template for developing successful collaboration” (Bliss et al., 130). Very importantly, the article described “the necessary steps to devise a plan to develop, fund, evaluate and sustain a community collaboration that connects doctors and lawyers in an effective partnership that fosters health and wellness and improves community conditions” (Bliss et al., 130). HeLP was organized to address the “multiple determinants of children’s health and well-being by combining the expertise of health care and legal professionals in a sustained community partnership” (Bliss et al., 130). However, on further reading of the article, it turned out that the collaboration described by Bliss et al., was not limited to the collaboration between health professionals and lawyers. It is actually a community partnership in which the three main partners had been the Children’s Healthcare Atlanta, the Atlanta Legal Aid Society and Georgia State University’s College of Law (GSU). In advancing health, the partnership provided direct health services as well as legal services (Bliss et al., 131). In particular, the partnership or collaboration among lawyers, health professionals, and the university provided direct legal services to low-income families; provided “interdisciplinary education related to the legal and social issues facing the clients of the HeLP”; and conducted “advocacy work” to advance children’s health (Bliss et al., 131). The legal services provided by the HeLP partnership or collaboration included “ensuring that chronically sick/disabled children receives appropriate education,” stabilizing families by protecting children from domestic violence, paralegal support to people affected by threats of power shut-offs that jeopardize a home environment, working for the eligibility of patients or clients for Medicaid and other health benefits, and helping patients obtain eligibility for food stamps when applicable (Bliss et al., 132-133) To finance programs, HelP has tapped “grants, donations from private foundations and other donors and the contribution of its partners” (Bliss et al., 134). Second Article: Interdisciplinary Collaboration Study In this article, Holzinger and colleagues reported their experience as a multidisciplinary team, consisting of nurses and medical doctors, who collaborated in developing and implementing a glucose control protocol for an intensive care unit. Holzinger and colleagues attributed to interdisciplinary collaboration the success of their protocol in significantly controlling glucose levels in an intensive care unit. The authors pointed out that median blood glucose levels decreased after implementing the interdisciplinary determined and implemented glucose control protocol from 133 to 110 mg/DL (P Read More