Notes on Inter-professional Collaboration Among Healthcare Givers.
When in doubt, always ask for help. Everyone knows something you don’t.
"He knew he was in trouble. He knew the women would die on the operating table if the swelling was not addressed.
So he sent for the matron and asked her,
'What can I do to save this woman. I've never seen this before in all my years of practice.'
The nurse replied, 'Apply normal saline'.
He did. The swelling reduced. He felt relieved.
An hour after he asked the matron, 'How did you know this?'
The matron replied, 'It's something you may know also, but it didn't come to mind because you were already under stress. It is simple osmosis...'
Years after Rear Admiral DHD (Not real initials) would always say to any military medical team
"When in doubt always ask for help... Always ask the nurses..."
This is a story I culled from my internship year in a military hospital. It was a piece of advice recounted by a Rear Admiral who was a consultant surgeon, about another colleague who had this experience.
***
Last year, I read the screenshot of a certain health influencer on this space insulting medical laboratory scientists.
Thankfully, I used metadata to search and that post seemed to no longer exist. It might have been written with deep-seated anger. The writer may have evolved over the years by the learning of true leadership and emotional intelligence.
But that screenshot is still flying around. The day I saw it I was shook to my haematopoietic stem cells. It was too derogatory to be brought to the public.
However, like I said, we often evolve over time even when we cannot clean any mess.
***
Some days ago, we argued here about how lack of proper communication among a medical team managing a patient can increase the risk of patients absconding from the hospital, without completing the full course of treatment.
I would later plug in to listen to this podcast by The Nocturnists on Google Podcast and hear this again from a caregiver, for the second time in my life, yesterday.
"When in doubt, call the nursing services department."
***
Dear caregiver,
Leader, member, adviser or follower of the medical team, are we collaborating or competing?
Are we working for the good of the patient or hating on one another.
Are we more interested in claiming superiority instead of thriving and building a formidable health sector through the collective intelligence of every professional in the healthcare sector?
If you were the patient, would you be comfortable when a half-hearted service is given because one member of the team considers the other irrelevant?
Remember, no one knows everything and everyone knows something.
We create loopholes by lack of inter-professional collaboration and unhealthy competition.
Everyone in the team exists for a reason and should not be taken for granted.
