Collaboration in Health Care

Health care involves the participation of patients, family, and a diverse team of often highly specialized health care professionals. Involvement of all these team members in a cooperative and coordinated way is essential to providing exceptional care. This article introduces key concepts relating to interprofessional collaborative teamwork. Approaches to measuring and studying collaboration and evidence demonstrating the benefits of collaboration are presented. The structural, psychological, and educational factors which may determine collaborative behaviour are described. LEARNING OBJECTIVES: By the end of this CME article, participants will be able to 1. Distinguish between multifunctional and interdisciplinary teams, 2. Define collaboration in a health care setting, 3. Describe the value of collaboration to patients, staff, and organizations, 4. Understand approaches to measuring collaboration, and 5. Identify factors that determine the ability of teams to collaborate. This article is a CME article and provides the equivalent of 2 hours of continuing education that may be applied to your professional development credit system. A 20-question multiple choice quiz follows this reading, and answers can be found on page 216. Please note that no formalized credit (Category A) is available from CAMRT.