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Abstract
Effective teamwork and collaboration among healthcare professionals is considered essential to achieving positive health outcomes and executing quality patient-centered care. Collaborative competence, alongside clinical and discipline-specific knowledge and skills, is a vital component of healthcare professionals’ overall competence given the majority of today’s patient care is delivered collaboratively across professions, specialties, and practices. One of the most defining features of collaboration in healthcare is that members work together to identify and find solutions to problems that arise throughout the course of patient care. The purpose of this qualitative, multiple case study is to explore the different problem situations that health professionals collaborate within and to examine how they perceive and carry out collaboration in varying problem situations. Four early career physicians (< 5 years of independent practice) were recruited to participate in a semi-structured interview, during which they described collaboration in healthcare and shared stories of collaboration in their everyday practice contexts. A total of 23 collaboration cases were collected, of which 21 were collaborations with other healthcare professionals. Results indicate that early career physicians collaborate on problem situations that vary in degree of certainty (i.e., well-defined, ill-defined), complexity, and dynamicity, and collaboration approaches vary depending on the nature of the problem at hand. Emerged patterns suggest early career physicians tend to follow appropriate established protocols and guidelines when they collaborate on relatively well-defined problem situations, and a more integrative collaboration approach appeared to be taken to resolve ill-defined, complex, and dynamic problem situations. Importantly, it was found that early career physicians are more likely to have positive collaborative experiences when the collaboration approach and problem nature are aligned (protocol-oriented collaboration for well-defined problems, integrative collaboration for ill-defined problems). The findings of the current study recommend that educators guide students to understand the different collaborative approaches and their features and provide them with opportunities to practice collaborating on real-world situations that differ in their degree of uncertainty, dynamicity, and complexity. With proper guidance and feedback, students can learn to flexibly and strategically adapt different collaborative approaches to help them achieve their goals for each situation.