Abstract:

A hospital workforce by its nature is made up of colleagues from a variety of health professions. Cultural differences exist between these different professions that can influence patient care and health outcomes. It is clear that effective and deliberate collaboration within clinical settings significantly improves patient care, but poor communication is a major cause of medical errors.

In hospitals, clinical pharmacists are successfully influencing prescribing trends to provide pharmaceutical care to their patients, thereby delivering a more patient-centered role than the traditional ‘dispensing’ model of working. However, meeting this goal relies on the existence of good working relationships, such that inter-disciplinary team working in monitoring patients becomes the norm in all-healthcare settings. Efforts to improve these relationships must focus on the strategic introduction of agreed changes in working practices between health care professionals and in addition a radical redesign of pharmacist education and training. Participation of other hospital practitioners in the continuing professional development of hospital pharmacists is arguably the way forward.

However, inter-professional education in the field of pharmacy and clinical unit staff should not be considered as a one-way street. Pharmacists with their knowledge of Pharmacotherapy, Pharmacokinetics and other related disciplines have much to contribute to medical/nurse education, at undergraduate and post-graduate levels, in a manner that will ultimately improve the collaborative working relationship.

Reciprocal learning could thus support working practices in defining the separate but inter-dependent professions of pharmacy, medicine and nursing.

Teaching goals:

• increasing the awareness of the role of pharmacist in hospital staff education
• highlight the interest of multidisciplinary approach in hospital staff education
• illustrating different kinds of tools in concrete situations

Learning objectives:

After the presentation the participant should:

• use reciprocal education as a tool to reinforce the integration of pharmacists in  collaborative hospital practices
• integrate other professional experiences in the development of pharmacy related standards, projects and practices
• be able to evaluate impact of collaborative education on practices