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Foster interdisciplinary communication with colleagues to improve patient care

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, December 23, 2002

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Not only does each clinical discipline have its own terminology and language, but it also has a unique set of skills, professional behaviors, values, and beliefs. Understanding and acknowledging those differences can help foster interdisciplinary communication. You and your fellow care providers must coordinate efforts to understand the unique contributions each discipline brings to the patient, and where those contributions overlap. The activity below is an example of one method of working towards a common understanding across various disciplines.

• Look at the active record of a patient receiving care from members of the care team that represent different disciplines. Write a list of words or phrases used in the record that are unclear. Then share this list with other members of the care team. Try to find a better "translation" for the phrases that are unclear, and share the results with your teammates. Have team members from different disciplines try the same exercise with the same chart, and then discuss substitute words and phrases that would be more useful to build a common language for future documentation.

  Editor's note: The above is an activity from the new online course "Working in Interdisciplinary Teams to Improve Patient Care." For more information on this course and other Nursing courses go to www.hcprofessor.com and click on Nursing.

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