Measurement of attitudes towards nurse/physician collaboration in the Health Care Corporation of St. John's

Pevida, Ary (2009) Measurement of attitudes towards nurse/physician collaboration in the Health Care Corporation of St. John's. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

An assessment of acute care nurses' and physicians' attitudes toward collaboration, as well as the relationship between interprofessional education and interprofessional collaboration, is crucial for the future development of health care in Canada. Collaboration has been identified, as a way of facilitating and improving the provision of patient care. Inter-professional education has been introduced at Memorial University of Newfoundland, but to succeed this approach to education should be guided by expected outcomes and should be designed to target current problems. -- The purpose of this study was to conduct an assessment of the attitudes of nurses and physicians in the St. John's region toward collaborative practice. Specific objectives of this study are: (a), To identify the prevailing attitudes towards collaborative practice among nurses and physicians in the workplace in the St. John's region, (b) To identify factors associated with more or less positive attitudes towards collaboration, and (c) To compare attitudes towards interprofessional practice of a class of graduating nursing and medical students from Memorial University, who had completed a formalized interprofessional component as part of their curriculum, with that of a cohort who had not. -- A descriptive, cross sectional correlational study design was used to assess nurse and physician attitudes toward collaborative practice. A validated assessment tool, The Jefferson Scale of Attitudes Toward Physician-Nurse Collaboration, (Jefferson Scale) was utilized to collect data related to this domain. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to create descriptive tables to describe the demographic characteristics of the respondents, to compare nurses' and physicians' scores on the Jefferson Scale and to determine which factors (e.g. occupation, age, education level etc.) predict a higher score on the Jefferson Scale of Attitude Toward Physician-Nurse collaboration. -- Overall, nurses (n= 526) showed a significantly greater willingness to collaborate than physicians (n = 205). The findings also showed that of the demographic and personal characteristics examined, level of education was the most positively associated with the total score on the Jefferson Scale. Finally, the data analysis also revealed a lack of association between total Jefferson Scale score and exposure to pre-licensure interprofessional education. -- Study findings suggest that in the current sample of nurses and physicians, nurses had the most positive attitudes towards collaborative practice, were dissatisfied with their limited involvement in the decision making process regarding patient care and favor an increase in their involvement in decisions related to patient care and policy development. Finally, results also show that female nurses and physicians who participated in the current study have more positive attitudes towards interprofessional collaboration in the work place than their male counterparts. -- Although study findings supported previous research, generalizability of the results to other acute care nurses and physicians is cautioned. There is an obvious need for further research to develop a greater understanding of the factors affecting the development and implementation of interprofessional education for the health sciences. Most importantly, the onus is on health care researchers to conduct more research studies on nurse-physician collaboration using more innovative and reliable designs such as action research. Evidence emanating from such research studies should serve as a guide for the development of Interprofessional Education.

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