Collaboration among nurses and other healthcare professionals is central to the delivery of high-quality patient care in almost any clinical setting you can name. Nurses are collaborative by nature, and it’s hard to imagine what nursing care would look like without it.

The Centrality of Collaboration

According to Merriam-Webster, the word collaborate is defined as “to work jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor.”This particular definition is ideal for our purposes, particularly about the work of nurses and their interdisciplinary colleagues.

Collaboration and cooperation are a hallmark of human society. While many of us don’t always play nice (just look at the numerous wars and conflicts throughout the world’s history, including the current ones), many human endeavors wouldn’t be possible without some form of collaboration.

Could a skyscraper be built if the architects, contractors, carpenters, plumbers, and welders didn’t collaborate? Could a car be manufactured if everyone on the assembly line were allowed to do whatever they wanted? Could a meal be cooked in a restaurant kitchen if no one listened to one another in the creation of the meal? Could a plane land if the pilot refused to collaborate with the air traffic controllers?

Nurses are trained from the outset to collaborate with others, and patients’ lives or well-being are often at stake in the process. And if collaboration means that we’re working jointly, then almost anything that a nurse can do in the course of their day is primarily governed by collaboration.

Nurses: Collaboration in Action

When nurses give one another a report, they’re collaborating on the care of a patient. Suppose a nurse is meeting with the physical therapist, surgeon, speech pathologist, and discharge planner. In that case, the group must, by nature, collaborate to maximize patient care and facilitate the course of treatment, clinical outcome, and eventual discharge.

Providing care in a patient’s home, the home health nurse collaborates with the patient and their family to arrange appropriate care tailored to that patient’s needs. Without the cooperation and collaboration of family and loved ones, our care often fails or yields outcomes that fall short of our expectations.

Nurse entrepreneurs generally can’t do it all alone. They may need web developers, virtual assistants, accountants, and others to run their business, regardless of its size. Even with strategic partnerships, cross-promotion, and peer support, nurses in business need to collaborate with a diverse range of people to achieve success.

Nurses collaborate as clinicians, educators, researchers, writers, filmmakers, and administrators. We nurses collaborate as a natural aspect of our training and education. Let’s face it: we need each other in almost everything we do.

The Tapestry of Collaboration

There is no end to the ways we can collaborate as nurses, whether with one another, our multidisciplinary colleagues, or our patients and their families. As nurses, we continually weave a rich tapestry of collaboration. We’re the threads, and we’re also the weavers, and we’re also the loom and the fabric itself.

The tapestry of nursing collaboration makes the healthcare system work. Without the spirit of collaboration, healthcare, and medicine as we know it would be virtually impossible. The tapestry of collaboration connects us all — it directly helps bring to fruition our ongoing dedication to our careers and the work we do as committed nursing professionals.

Article by: Keith Carlson, BSN, RN, NC-BC, at dailynurse.com