This study will suggest means of championing future person-centered interprofessional collaborative practice based on rituals/routines and person-centeredness and as the central themes. As McCormack, Dewing, and McCance (2011, n.p.) define person-centered nursing, “it is an approach to practice that is established through the formation and fostering of therapeutic relationships between all care providers, patients, and others significant to them.
Orchard, Curran, and Kabene (2005, p.2) highlight organizational structuralism, power relationships, and role socialization as factors creating potential barriers to collaborative nursing. They, therefore, suggest that traditional routines where nurses are directed and controlled should be alternated with supportive environments. In short, nurses should be able to air their views, consult with patients, and be part of the decision-making bodies (Hall &Roussel 2012, p.154). On matters of power imbalances, teamwork should be supported by scraping the organizational cultures where rather than work as teams, health professionals identify with their “common” groups and this clogs their ability to consider the perspectives and opinions of others (Reeves, Lewin, Espin, &Zwarenstein 2011, p.89). This not only affects the professionals but the patients and the organization at large.
In addressing this, collaboration should be instilled within healthcare contexts by shifting focus on cooperation rather than on competition as nursing is defined as a practice based on discipline (Black 2013, p.63). Therefore, nurses should realize that their focus is more on patient wellbeing than their own personal gains. Collaborative nursing practice, again, can be through creating an understanding between health care professionals that while every discipline is unique in its own cultures, they should work together.
In short, as Clarke &Wilcockson (2002, p.397) state, “…healthcare providers must learn to accept a blurring of practice boundaries and trust other discipline members in sharing patient care processes”. In this way, different disciplines can work together by overlapping roles and coming up with better health care dissemination. The patient is a crucial factor when addressing collaborative practice matters because nursing is all about the patient. As such, every patient should be respected and dignified irrespective of factors such as age or race (Yoost, B & Crawford, L 2015, p.397). An example of a lack of collaborative nursing is that while the demand for nursing care in older people is on the rise, person-centered is lacking due to a shortage of nurses (Nicholas & Campbell 2011, p.2814). Again, racial discrimination has also been seen in some nursing contexts.
Therefore, measures to ensure dignifying and respect of patients by healthcare professionals should be considered if collaborative practice and person-centered care are to come by. Training, as Huber (2013, p.118) explains, is one way through which this can be achieved. In this way, collaboration within healthcare organizations as well as with external stakeholders such as patients will add up to the much-required collaborative nursing.
Conclusion Nursing as a disciplined practice is expected to respect and care for the patient. This care, however, cannot be achieved if collaboration within and beyond the health care context does not exist. Limiting factors include rigid traditional nursing practices such as lack of freedom of expression in nurses. In patients, some healthcare parties remain racist or unable to care for marginalized patients such as the aged. Therefore, in achieving collaborative practice and person-centered care in nursing as an integral part of organizational complexity, these issues should be straightened as discussed in this study.
