Interdisciplinary Team Participation

Guidelines:

• Interdisciplinary team participation helps promote a positive practice environment, which encourages safe patient care practices, promotes optimal patient outcomes, and creates a desirable workplace
• Perioperative RNs should be active participants in interdisciplinary teams
  • Shared governance activities
    • Shared decision making
  • Staff education
  • Committees
  • Huddles

Considerations:

• Health care organizations should establish processes to create a patient safety culture and encourage individual team members to actively engage in and support the culture
  • Promote respect among team members
  • Encourage honesty
  • Foster learning
  • Encourage collaborative practice
  • Encourage team members to speak up
  • Holding team members accountable for their behavior
  • Maintain adequate staffing systems
  • Providing expert, credible, and visible leadership
  • Provide opportunities for shared decision making at all levels
  • recognizing the value of each team member’s  contributions

Nurse’s role:

• Perioperative RNs should be active participants in interdisciplinary teams
  • Collaborative practice
    • Members of a highly functioning perioperative team communicate, collaborate, and respect each other’s roles and skill sets
    • Promotes patient safety and perioperative nurse retention
  • Professional practice
    • Ongoing education, professional development, and certification 
    • Engaged, educated, and committed perioperative nursing workforce
  • Accountability
    • Responsible and accountable for professional practice to their patients, the interdisciplinary perioperative team, the health care organization, and themselves
  • Communication
    • Clear, accurate, timely, respectful, inclusive, open, and trusting communication
    • Skills include self-awareness, conflict management, negotiation, advocacy, listening, and techniques for delivering critical information
  • Continuous Quality Improvement
    • Implementation in organization and departmental culture of safety
  • Shared Decision Making
    • Participate in policy development and decision making at all levels of the organization
    • Perioperative RNs empowered in the process of developing, maintaining, and implementing professional standards advance the profession and improve clinical outcomes

Pitfalls:

• Organizational culture and communication failures contribute to adverse events
• Nursing work environments are significantly associated with patient care quality indicators
  • 30 day inpatient mortality
  • Failure to rescue
  • In-hospital cardiac arrest survival
  • Readmission rate
  • Patient satisfaction

Examples:

• N/A

Linchpins (Key Points):

• Engaged team members = patient safety culture + positive practice environment
• Nursing work environments directly impact quality indicators
• Perioperative RNs should be active participants in interdisciplinary team activities