Interprofessional communication and collaboration are promoted by policymakers as fundamental building blocks for improving patient safety and meeting the demands of increasingly complex care. This paper reports qualitative findings of an interprofessional intervention designed to improve communication and collaboration between different professions in general internal medicine (GIM) hospital wards in Canada. The intervention promoted self-introduction by role and profession to a collaborating colleague in relation to the shared patient, a question or communication regarding the patient, to be followed by an explicit request for feedback from the partner professional. Implementation and uptake of the intervention were evaluated using qualitative methods, including 90 hours of ethnographic observations and interviews collected in both intervention and comparison wards. Documentary data were also collected and analysed. Fieldnotes and interviews were transcribed and analysed thematically. Our findings suggested that the intervention did not produce the anticipated changes in communication and collaboration between health professionals, and allowed us to identify barriers to the implementation of effective collaboration interventions. Despite initially offering verbal support, senior physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals minimally explained the intervention to their junior colleagues and rarely role-modelled or reiterated support for it. Professional resistances as well as the fast paced, interruptive environment reduced opportunities or incentive to enhance restrictive interprofessional relationships. In a healthcare setting where face-to-face spontaneous interprofessional communication is not hostile but is rare and impersonal, the perceived benefits of improvement are insufficient to implement simple and potentially beneficial communication changes, in the face of habit, and absence of continued senior clinician and management support.

Research suggests that health care can be improved and patient harm reduced when health professionals successfully collaborate across professional boundaries. Consequently, there is growing support for interprofessional collaboration in health and social care, both nationally and internationally. Factors including professional hierarchies, discipline-specific patterns of socialization, and insufficient time for teambuilding can undermine efforts to improve collaboration. This paper reports findings from an ethnographic study that explored the nature of interprofessional interactions within two general and internal medicine (GIM) settings in Canada. 155 hours of observations and 47 interviews were gathered with a range of health professionals. Data were thematically analyzed and triangulated. Study findings indicated that both formal and informal interprofessional interactions between physicians and other health professionals were terse, consisting of unidirectional comments from physicians to other health professionals. In contrast, interactions involving nurses, therapists and other professionals as well as intraprofessional exchanges were different. These exchanges were richer and lengthier, and consisted of negotiations which related to both clinical as well as social content. The paper draws on Strauss' (1978) negotiated order theory to provide a theoretical lens to help illuminate the nature of interaction and negotiation in GIM.

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BackgroundPoor interprofessional communication in hospital is deemed to cause significant patient harm. Although recognition of this issue is growing, protocols are being implemented to solve this problem without empirical research on the interprofessional communication interactions that directly underpin patient care. We report here the first large qualitative study of directly-observed talk amongst professions in general internal medicine wards, describing the content and usual conversation partners, with the aim of understanding the mechanisms by which current patterns of interprofessional communications may impact on patient care.MethodsQualitative study with 155 hours of data-collection, including observation and one-on-one shadowing, ethnographic and semi-structured interviews with physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals in the General Internal Medicine (GIM) wards of two urban teaching hospitals in Canada. Data were coded and analysed thematically with a focus on collaborative interactions between health professionals in both interprofessional and intraprofesional contexts.ResultsPhysicians in GIM wards communicated with other professions mainly in structured rounds. Physicians’ communications were terse, consisting of reports, requests for information, or patient-related orders. Non-physician observations were often overlooked and interprofessional discussion was rare. Intraprofessional interactions among allied health professions, and between nursing, as well as interprofessional interactions between nursing and allied health were frequent and deliberative in character, but very few such discussions involved physicians, whose deliberative interactions were almost entirely with other physicians.ConclusionWithout interprofessional problem identification and discussion, physician decisions take place in isolation. While this might be suited to protocol-driven care for patients whose conditions were simple and courses predictable, it may fail complex patients in GIM who often need tailored, interprofessional decisions on their care.Interpersonal communication training to increase interprofessional deliberation may improve efficiency, patient-centredness and outcomes of care in hospitals. Also, electronic communications tools which reduce cognitive burden and facilitate the sharing of clinical observations and orders could help physicians to engage more in non-medical deliberation. Such interventions should take into account real-world power differentials between physicians and other health professions.

As overt acts of discrimination become less acceptable in society, it does not necessarily disappear but rather manifests itself in covert forms. By disavowing and distancing themselves from discrimination, these women exposed the degree to which these issues continue to be pervasive in surgery. Women surgeons' ability to both identify and resist discrimination was hobbled by narratives of individualism, gender equality, and normative ideas of gender difference.