ANSWER
You described a situation where interdisciplinary collaboration between healthcare professionals was demonstrated in practice. Your team, including yourself as a student nurse, your instructor, the director of nursing, and the nursing assistants, worked together to provide efficient and effective care to a patient whose health was rapidly declining. Despite the outcome not being favorable, you acknowledged the success of the collaboration in getting the patient to the hospital as quickly as possible. As a novice nurse leader, you would repeat the same process but with a possible consideration of reducing the time it took to make the decision to transfer the patient.

QUESTION
It has been observed that the interprofessional collaboration between physicians, nurses, and other members of the health care team increases the collective awareness of each other’s (type of) knowledge and skills. Furthermore, this contributes to the quality of care through the continued improvement in decision-making”( Busari ET AL., 2017) Though I have not held a position in the healthcare field as of yet and I haven’t had much onsite clinical experience, I have still been lucky enough to witness interdisciplinary collaborative care first hand. At the beginning of my nursing journey, our clinical was held at an assisted living facility. In this facility, there was a director of nursing always present, there were us as student nurses and our professor who was the registered nurse, and then there were certified, nursing assistants. There was one day in particular when I had a patient whose health was rapidly declining which required us to collaborate as a team and act fast. In this instance, I initially ran vitals and identified the differences in health trends, and alerted the director that there was an issue. When this came to light, we had a group discussion in which the director decided that it would be best that we get this patient to the hospital. In doing so she coordinated facility care until the paramedics arrived. Myself and my instructor were advised to remain with the patient and assess changes and monitor vitals. The C.N.A was instructed to clean the patient and dress her for transfer. The D.O.N would contact the lead physician who advised that the patient be brought into the hospital based on her current condition and status. The D.O.N then gave a handoff report, notified the family, and assessed the client’s chart for pertinent information needed in the transfer.

Though I feel that the collaboration was successful and collaborative care was efficient in the current setting, the outcome was not in our favor. We worked well as a team to get the patient to the next facility as rapidly as possible which was a success on our end. As a novice nurse leader, I would do things the same. The only thing that I may have changed is the amount of time it to decide to transition the client from the facility to the hospital setting.