Inter-professional physician-nurse collaboration in Lebanon

Abstract

PurposeA physician–nurse relationship is a complex, professional and shared-decision-making process, which is an important predictor of high-quality patient care. The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitude of the physician–nurse relationship in Southern Lebanon hospitals.Design/methodology/approachA descriptive institutional cross-sectional study was conducted among different departments of three hospitals in Southern Lebanon using a validated Jefferson Scale of Attitude.FindingsIn sum, 89 physicians and 245 nurses accepted to participate. The nurses’ mean age was 32 and the physicians’ was 44. The mean score was found to be 46 for all participants, with significantly higher scores noted among nurses compared to physicians (48 vs 43, respectively) and higher scores among females compared to males (48 vs 46, respectively). However, the study scored no significant difference in relation to the degrees attained by nurses and the participants’ years of experience. The majority had agreed that the shortage in the nurses’ staff affects proper patient care delivery. One fourth of the physicians disagreed that nurses should be considered as a collaborator and colleague. Therefore, more work is required to improve this collaboration.Research limitations/implicationsThere is a complex relationship normally displayed by physicians and nurses, which cannot be easily interpreted and analyzed. Physicians and nurses may have given socially desirable responses while filling the questionnaire. Even more, this study was conducted in Hospitals in Southern Lebanon, and it would be nice to extend this study to include further hospitals in other regions in Lebanon as well.Practical implicationsNurses had higher scores toward collaboration, with females scoring higher than males. However, overall scores are considered to be lower compared to other countries. Thus, more efforts should be done on improving this communication among nurses and physicians, through promoting inter-professional undergraduate and postgraduate education training toward more effective communication.Social implicationsQuality of patient care would be improved if more work is done on improving the collaboration between physicians and nurses, and this was shown to be required as per study results.Originality/valueThere is a gap in literature assessing this important topic which is the collaboration and attitude of nurses and physicians toward their relationship in Lebanon. It is extremely important that efforts should be taken in order to determine the type of nurse–physician relationship in every local context as this relationship affects quality of patients’ care.

Pengembangan Panduan Kompetensi Interprofessional Collaboration Practice di Ruang Rawat Inap

“…Hal ini bisa disebabkan karena kurangnya kejelasan peran dalam praktik kolaborasi (LaMothe et al, 2021). Padahal dalam penelitian di Libanon, perawat memiliki skor lebih tinggi dalam berkolaborasi (Ahmadieh et al, 2020).…”

Challenges of 21st-century health governance

“…From Lebanon, Ahmadieh et al (2019) report on an area of conflict within the hospital sector. They suggested that effective and respectful physician–nurse collaboration is an indicator of care quality.…”

Examining the Views of Operating Room Nurses and Physicians on the Relationship between Professional Values and Professional Communication

“…Because of the cramped atmosphere of operating rooms, the personnel's having close contact with each other for a long time in the same room, the high pressure of work, doctors' tendency to make decisions without consulting the other members of the surgery team, nurses' limited autonomy, and ethical inequalities in the medial personnel's income and work privileges, the incidence of the above-mentioned consequences is higher in operating rooms (2,3,8,9). In many hospitals, the relationship between doctors and the other personnel is not satisfactory, leading to implicit or explicit verbal con icts and even physical ghts which, inevitably, have adverse effects on the doctors, the personnel and, by extension, the patients.…”