‘Cogs in a well oiled machine’. The power of multidisciplinary collaboration in healthcare service delivery.

Collaborative learning in practice is an approach taken by multidisciplinary health professionals to acquire new knowledge with a number of goals:

 

1. To better understand and navigate the complex healthcare system in response to an ageing population
2. To promote mutual respect and understanding for individual roles and responsibilities
3. To improve communication

 

And the most important

4. To improve patient outcomes.

 

The metaphoric disconnect between clinical environments and the laboratory is historic, and there is an overwhelming sense that a lack of awareness of the processes carried out in laboratories can significantly impact service delivery for a variety of reasons. One of the primary attributions if this disconnect may be down to the physical separation of departments, which can present missed opportunities for communication and collaboration. There is a huge scope for maximisation of biomedical scientist to reach out to clinical areas to act in an advisory capacity when it comes to pre-analytical specimen collection in addition to the usual quality measures taken within the laboratory to ensure the integrity of the sample and result prior to report.

 

Multidisciplinary collaboration between all healthcare professional groups plays a significant part in enhancing service quality through sharing a wealth of both technical and clinical knowledge with the focus on enhancing the patient experience. There is evidence to support that collaboration between Healthcare scientists and clinical staff ensures accurate and timely diagnoses, whilst interception at the pre-analytical stage reduces the likelihood of sampling errors, decreases the volume of misdirected samples and prevents incorrect labelling in addition to other types of human error.

Collaboration also allows all groups of health professionals to look at current processes and assess ways that optimise practice and develop current and new protocols with a focus on reducing error and enhancing patient safety.

One of the ways in which we have managed to foster this within our Microbiology department is to have medical students and foundation year doctors shadow biomedical scientists. During this process, medical professionals are given exposure to different sections of the laboratory that range from processing specimens, to learning the theory behind the use of differential and selective media, getting to carry out biochemical tests and interpreting antibiotic sensitivity results. This learning experience is reciprocated as our consultants allow for us to attend ward rounds, meetings, and participate in daily bench rounds where we often get to listen to interesting clinical cases involving the samples we have processed. We get to learn much more about the person behind the sample, and we get to see the value of the work we do as non-clinical practitioners.

 

As Biomedical scientists, this is something we are deeply appreciative of and is something we can filter down to biomedical support staff. A number of biomedical support staff will eventually go on to become registered biomedical scientists. The importance of filtering down knowledge increases technical proficiency and starts to prepare them for pre registration training and eventual post registration professional practice by allowing them exposure to important information that they can learn from. There is no reason why the acquisition of knowledge should be reserved solely for one or two professional groups.

As someone who has a bit of a penchant for training and development and quality improvement, I started to consider what I could do in my role to empower other staff groups to participate in multidisciplinary learning experiences to further enrich and up-skill the expanding workforce.

I was exposed to this early on as a trainee when I got to work closely with our sexual health department to help facilitate near patient direct culture for gonorrhoea with some fantastic results that saw a decrease in the number of culture negative, PCR positive results.

In my practice I try to share as much knowledge as I have learned on my journey as a trainee and now trainee specialist biomedical scientist with our support staff. It might be explaining the science behind gram staining, or explaining how chromogenic media works, but sharing that knowledge provides an important underpinning that allows staff to link theory to practice.

 

“Knowledge is a commodity to be shared. For knowledge to pay dividends, it should not remain the monopoly of the selected few” – Moustasem Algharati