Collaborative Nursing Practice

Inter-professional collaborations are invaluable relationships between healthcare professionals that are formed with the sole purpose of providing optimum help for a service user (Hornby and Atkins, 2000). Goodman and Clemow (2010) explain that collaborative practice is actually based around two ideas. The first is that nurses need to be able to work with other professionals, and the second is that they need to be able to work with ‘people’. They go on to explain that the concept of collaborative practice is based on the idea that excellent patient care relies on the expertise of a number of care providers. Day (2006) points out that actually defining what collaborative working is, is very complex, and that in order to understand what exactly collaborative working means within the context of nursing, an understanding of what collaboration is, is required, along with the ability to apply this understanding to a number of other terms which are often used both interchangeably and synonymously with this one in literature. According to Day, collaboration can be defined as individuals or agencies working together in order to achieve something that neither can achieve alone. This, however, is not to be confused with the meaning of inter-professional working, which is defined as professionals from different disciplines working between and among each other for the mutual benefit of those involved. Understanding that the two phrases are in fact different in nature allows us to have a more comprehensive understanding of what it means to use the term inter-professional collaborative practice, and this can be defined as professionals from different disciplines working together towards a common goal in order to achieve something that neither can achieve alone.

Day suggests that the idea of inter-professional collaboration is an integral part of effective, holistic healthcare delivery, but also that this idea is not a new one. In fact she goes on to say that its importance was

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