Article Review: Inter-Professional Collaboration in Healthcare
Collaboration is essential in healthcare settings because it improves treatment outcomes while creating an ethical workplace. Ewashen, McInnis-Perry, and Murphy (2013) analyzed two cases in which conflicts occurred through the lenses of biomedical ethics, relational ethics, and virtue ethics. Those three perspectives can enable healthcare professionals to act ethically and encourage inter-professional collaboration by providing different principles and guidelines they can use when assessing situations and making decisions.
For example, relational ethics prioritizes building relationships with patients, their families, and colleagues. Of course, some professional boundaries need to be established, but empathy and respectable behavior should always be implemented (American Nurses Association, 2001). If a nurse’s opinion is ignored or the ability to perform a meaningful assessment is questioned, conflicts between members can arise because mutual respect, conflict resolution, and meaningful relations are not implemented. In order to act ethically in that case, healthcare professionals need to learn to respect their colleagues, improve their communication skills, and resort to conflict resolution strategies when necessary because that will help them build meaningful and productive relationships.
Ewashen et al. (2013) suggest that all three theories used to examine the scenarios are equally valuable because they work on a common goal and provide valid guidelines for ethical behavior. In order to understand all situations completely, they need to be observed through different angles, and that is why observing one case using three theories can reveal that several elements may be accountable for unethical behaviors at the workplace.
According to Ewashen et al. (2013), practical applications of inter-professional collaboration may be rhetoric instead of actual because all scenarios that described inter-professional conflicts placed the emphasis of nurses and physicians in care while neglecting the contribution of other professionals. The traditional healthcare hierarchy approach was also identified as a major obstacle to the successful implementation of ethics in inter-professional collaboration because it created different relations of power and reduced synergy.
References
American Nurses Association. (2001). Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements. Nursing World. Retrieved from http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ EthicsStandards/CodeofEthicsforNurses/Code-of-Ethics.pdf
Ewashen, C., McInnis-Perry, G., & Murphy, N. (2013). Interprofessional collaboration-in-practice: The contested place of ethics. Nursing Ethics, 20(3), 325-335. doi:10.1177/0969733012462048
