NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 2 Interview and Interdisciplinary Issue Identification

Interview and Interdisciplinary Issue Identification

Student Name

Capella University

NURS FPX4010

Professor name

Submission Date

Interdisciplinary collaboration in healthcare is interprofessional workforce, which improves health outcomes in a community. The interprofessional team is a group including people of all medical disciplines who are part of an organization to work and offer high-quality interventions to patients. It has been proposed that in most medical error cases, the failure of teamwork and carelessness in the healthcare system is the cause and have become a significant cause of death in the US (Bouton et al., 2023).

Organizational interventions are developed by the work of an interprofessional team based on research in the healthcare setting to reduce clinical errors, improve health, and improve patient satisfaction. This interview intends to identify interdisciplinary concerns based on the interview and address the issues with the best practices and evidence-based interventions to achieve health equity and safety.

Interview Summary

An interview with Mr. Alex John, a Patient Safety Officer at Riverbend Medical Center, a mid-sized acute care hospital with emergency, medical-surgical, and intensive care units, was conducted. Mr. Alex works with incident reporting, root cause analysis, and quality improvement of activities related to patient safety. He said in the interview that he had remembered a major medical mistake, and as part of this one, there was a breakdown in communication when transferring a patient to an emergency department. The patient presented with a history of chest pain and shortness of breath to the emergency department and had an incomplete verbal handoff when being transferred to the cardiac step-down unit.

The patient experienced a shift change, during which a high allergy level to heparin had been noted in her record, but no verbal communication of this was made to her. As a result, the heparin dose was administered shortly after transfer, and it contributed to the emergence of acute bleeding complications and unwarranted ICU hospitalization. The mistake was detected in hours, and the patient survived, although with a long stay in the hospital and further invasive procedures.

Mr. Alex continued to explain that the root cause analysis revealed that there were multiple contributory factors that included inconsistent use of standardized handoff tools, peak admission hours, and an assumption that the staff had about the vital information already being shared electronically. These applications, he explained, increased the chances that the information would be skipped or misinterpreted, since the verbal communication had not been reinforced by using electronic health records (Alsadaan, 2023).

The case showed deficiencies in interprofessional communication between emergency physicians and nurses and during the process of receiving unit staff, in particular, at high-pressure care transitions. The major issue that was pointed out in this interview is that poor communication and transfer of patients, in particular, are significant contributors to medical errors. With that, interdisciplinary collaboration and implementation of standard procedures ought to continue in the quest to ensure patient safety.

Issue Identification

Lack of interdisciplinary communication among health professionals during shift change when faced with emergencies was the main issue of concern in the interview, which was identified as the main problem. The latter barrier to communication is observed in the shift change between the professionals and the discharge of individuals in the chronic case management. The issue of interdisciplinary communication affects the overall health condition of the patients since they receive late care, medication mistakes, become confused, and are at risk of readmission.

This proves the fact that any interdisciplinary problem that occurs in an organization can be ascribed to the collective failure of the healthcare professionals, which affects the accountability and credibility of the leadership (Jabbar et al., 2023). An organization should embrace a healthy practice of an interdisciplinary approach to train nurses and other employees on active communication and cooperation to curb these. The practice will eventually facilitate efficient interdisciplinary communication that will improve patient-centered care because of a common process of decision-making.

The other significant issue set during the interview was that the organization had become over-reliant on technology as a substitute for face-to-face communication. Even though electronic health records and other electronic documentation systems were designed to help improve accuracy and efficiency, they, unintentionally, resulted in the development of communication gaps in accurate medicine, wherein clinicians assumed that some essential information had already been adequately provided through the use of the system. Each of these systemic defects allowed establishing a context in which miscommunication was possible without any immediate notification, fueling the possibility of preventable medical errors and unfavorable patient outcomes.

Change Theories that could Lead to Interdisciplinary Solutions

Interprofessional workers in healthcare must include change theory in addressing interdisciplinary issues to achieve better outcomes in an organization. One of the change theories that might be used to counteract these medical problems because of communication and collaboration barriers is the Lewin change theory, which works by following the process of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing (Harrison et al., 2021). Unfreezing here lies in the recognition of the exact problem on time, based on augmenting the practical experience and teaching to the staff.

The altering phase presupposes the use of interdisciplinary methods and tools for healthcare employees. And the refreezing step entails the assurance of integrating the communication structure into the training and daily nursing and other professionals’ working processes. The Lewin framework interventions can help improve the long-term behavior and credibility of a health organization to address medical errors at appropriate times.

Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA), which refers to the quality of patient health, is another important change theory that can be introduced into the case. The framework is also highly applicable and available in the health care sector as it poses interventions on adjustable communication and collaboration tactics. PDSA helps organizations invest time in the improvement of communication barriers by outlining roles, regularly reviewing patients to get medical results, and streamlining the process of improvement (Vaitsis & Christina, 2025). The interdisciplinary approach to these change theories is more useful in improving health inequity and safety of the patients, far more lucid and functional during day-to-day operations and emergencies during the changing of shifts.

Leadership Strategies That Could Lead to an Interdisciplinary Solution

The most important leadership strategy is transformational leadership in an interprofessional team to establish a shared vision, disciplined goals, active collaboration, encouragement, and motivation in the interprofessional team. These transformational arrangements cultivate peer trust, job satisfaction, and motivation towards the interprofessional team.

Transformational leadership can be utilized to solve medication errors through ensuring clear and structured communication and a shared vision between the modules in an interprofessional team and minimizing misunderstanding during prescription, dispensing, and administration. This style of leadership ensures that the matters that revolve around medication are discussed openly and corrected before resulting in any harm to the patient by ensuring that collaboration, trust, and accountability are promoted.

The second leadership strategy that may be deemed as important is a common or participative ground between medical personnel to promote patient-centered therapy and an effective decision-making process. The practice is intended to strategize and problem-solve interventions, and incorporates transparency in communication in the transfer of care of patients to address medical mistakes in the organization. Peer review strategy aids in the credibility of the organization by actively communicating and holding healthcare professionals responsible.

Shared or participatory leadership helps to avoid medication errors related to possible oversight by involving different professionals in healthcare professionals in fulfilling all three functions: decision-making, verification, and care transfer. This plan will increase accountability and minimize the multiple checks that can facilitate peer review and open communication, leading to safer drugs and better patient outcomes.

Collaboration Approach for Interdisciplinary Teams

Collaboration approaches toward finding solutions to interdisciplinary problems in healthcare can be considered critical to the interprofessional teams in the practice of patient-centered care dynamics. The most prevalent approach that is implemented in the healthcare systems, which can be discussed as the model of the improvement of professional collaboration, is the Interprofessional Collaborative Practice (IPCP). The framework pays much attention to joint decision-making and an arrangement of care based on the patient-centered health approach. Together with the transparency of communication between all team members, in order to achieve health outcomes in emergency cases of acute conditions.

The other collaboration strategy, which will be useful to address such medical errors, is TeamSTEPPS, which is an interprofessional collaboration strategy founded on the teamwork policy and an effective set of tools to aid health safety. This strategy, developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), provides both clinical and nonclinical information to facilitate communication, leadership, and team support, as well as to monitor the situation in healthcare facilities (Shi et al., 2024). TeamSTEPPS will reduce medication errors by standardizing communication resources, such as SBAR, check-backs, and handoff practices.

This ensures that valuable medication information is effectively exchanged and verified throughout initiation and continuation of care. The plan aims at promoting a viable and sound empirical foundation and adaptation strategies to apply in healthcare units in chronic health management. The approach can be used to quickly identify discrepancies in medication orders and intervene early to minimize medication administration errors and improve patient safety by increasing the monitoring and collegial support between the team members.

Conclusion

Interprofessional teamwork and interdisciplinary problems of medical errors in acute care organisations are explored using the interview-based assessment. Mr. Alex John has the opportunity to provide an in-depth interview as he is an experienced nurse and has discussed all the organizational issues and complications that affect interprofessional relationships. Labeling the interdisciplinary issues, including communication and transformational barriers, the assessment proposes the evidence-based theories of change, leadership behaviors, and collaborative approaches that have to be implemented in an organizational setting. These strategies enable organizations to deal with everyday interdisciplinary problems on teams and patient-care interventions with an improvement in health outcomes.