Prof. Name
Date
Interdisciplinary collaboration ensures smooth operations and delivery of quality healthcare to the patients. The report is based on an interview with my nursing school colleague Katy. In the interview, Katy discussed the pertinent healthcare issue – adverse drug events (ADEs)- encountered at her workplace and requires immediate actions to preserve patient safety and improve quality of care. I used a guiding strategy for the interview, using open-ended questions to prevent suggesting answers and gathering maximum information from Katy. A study by Connor Desai and Reimers (2019) mentions that using open-ended questions allows interviewees to provide detailed and holistic answers, which eventually helps the interviewer to develop a broad understanding of the concerns.
Katy is a registered nurse at Miami Valley Hospital (MVH), a well-known tertiary care setting in Miami City. The organization covers all specialties of healthcare and has qualified healthcare professionals. As a registered nurse, Katy’s daily routine involves assessments, medication administration, interdisciplinary rounds, hygiene care, and addressing patient concerns. One of the affairs the hospital has recently encountered is the increased number of adverse drug events (ADE) due to medication administration, leading to several complications and eventually causing death. Some major factors of this issue in MVH are nurse shortages and workload, lack of proper hands-off communication, and inadequate training.
She further detailed that administrators developed a zero-tolerance policy for negligence in medication administration three months ago. However, the policy is ineffective because of the nonexistence of an incidence reporting system and a blaming culture within the organization. Due to the fear of reprimand and legal penalties, nurses prevent themselves from reporting such incidences. Lack of leadership support and ineffective collaboration among the healthcare team are other reasons behind the futility of organizational reforms.
Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) are pertinent issues in healthcare organizations worldwide, specifically due to medication administration errors. The World Health Organization defines ADEs as unsafe and damaging responses to a medication that can be life-threatening for the individual. These adverse events can result from preventable medication errors or any administered medication’s side effects (Khalil & Huang, 2020). Their potential to impact patient safety, increase healthcare costs, and pose negative results on organizational operations make them a significant healthcare issue. Therefore, an evidence-based interprofessional approach will be appropriate to eliminate these issues from the healthcare sector.
This approach would bring diverse expertise from various healthcare disciplines, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the issue, utilizing multiple skills to provide holistic patient care, leading to individual accountability, and helping develop effective solutions through multidisciplinary integration (Bendowska & Baum, 2023). Another key reason to apply an interdisciplinary approach is to prevent ADEs through effective communication among healthcare team members. As evident from our interviewee’s organization, lack of communication led to several adverse events within the setting; thus, an interdisciplinary team is essential to facilitate communication for efficient medication management, reducing the likelihood of errors and ADEs (Rodziewicz et al., 2023). Therefore, an interdisciplinary approach is appropriate to recognize, avoid, and manage adverse drug events competently, ultimately preserving patient safety and augmenting healthcare quality.
Change Theories That Could Lead to an Interdisciplinary Solution
The PDSA (plan-do-study-act) model is a credible and well-established quality improvement framework endorsed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), claiming that it is a cycle that permits the implementation of the change to resolve healthcare issues, continuously improving the healthcare environment (AHRQ, n.d.). Another study has proven the effectiveness of the PDSA model as it helps nurses improve their efficiency within healthcare practices by bringing effective reforms (Pan et al., 2022). In the “plan” phase, the organization must recognize the necessity of addressing ADEs by collecting data about incidences and associated complications, forming an interdisciplinary team, and developing measurable, realistic, and attainable goals. Further, a comprehensive plan should be developed, outlining the evidence-based strategies implemented in the “do” step.
The results of the implementation s
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