Exploring the Perception of Nurse-Physician Collaboration on Medical Surgical and Intermediate Care Units: A Pilot Study

Communication is an important part of a collaborative relationship. In healthcare, lack of communication can lead medical failures to patient errors, and even patient death. Communication failures account to 70% of 2455 annual sentinel events, and 76% of persons having a sentinel event and with subsequent death. Nurse-physician collaboration is defined as “an interpersonal process where physicians and nurses present with shared objects”. Both physicians and nurses need to have equity in decision-making, and in the responsibility of managing the patient in order to decrease patient mortality and improve quality of patient. In order to evoke effective communication between both parties, there needs to be elements of respect and mutual trust in the relationship. The purpose of this grant proposal is to describe research to explore and measure the differences in perception of collaboration amongst physician and nurses on the medical surgical, and intermediate care units of a southern California hospital. A healthcare association between the distinctive units regarding nurse-physician collaboration differences may suggest interventions to enhance collaboration. Enhanced collaboration may increase the nurse’s job satisfaction, decrease nurse burnout, facilitate retention of nurses and decrease hospital financial strain resulting from high staff turnover rates. Ultimately patient’s benefit from decreased medical errors resulting from miscommunications amongst physicians and nurses.