The Benefits Of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Great minds think alike. In healthcare, great minds think alike but with vastly different perspectives. Although brilliance within the medical field is without limit, the unique perspective and individuality of each professional is what allows health care to thrive and adapt to new times and technology, all while still striving to achieve the main goal of providing excellent patient care. To best utilize this wide variety of intelligence, many health care facilities incorporate interdisciplinary collaboration. Although educating personnel and students on interdisciplinary collaboration may lead to complications with comprehension and confidence, utilizing input from various departments through collaboration drastically improves patient prognosis
because it provides a multitude of diverse ideas and options for treatment that could have potentially been overlooked had only one department determined the course of action.

Interdisciplinary collaboration in the medical field is an integrated team approach to health care, involving the design, implementation, and evaluation of a treatment plan and options involving all members of the team, in consultation with patients and their families (Lai, Lai, Ho, Wong, & Cheung, 2015). It is both a process and an outcome, involving the synthesis of the various brilliant perspectives involved working together to develop a solution inconceivable by any one individual (Gardner, 2005).