Abstract
Professional associations, nurse scholars, and practicing nurses suggest that intraprofessional collaboration between nurses is essential for the provision of quality patient care. However, there is a paucity of evidence describing collaboration among nurses, including the outcomes of collaboration to support these claims. The aim of this scoping review was to examine nursing practice guidelines that inform the registered nurse (RN) and registered/licensed practical nurse (R/LPN) collaborative practice in acute care, summarize and disseminate the findings, and identify gaps in the literature. Ten practice guidelines, all published in Canada, were included in the final scoping review. The findings indicate that many of the guidelines were not evidence informed, which was a major gap. Although the guidelines discussed the structures needed to support intraprofessional collaboration, and most of the guidelines mention that quality patient care is the desired outcome of intraprofessional collaboration, outcome indicators for measuring successful collaborative practice were missing in many of the guidelines. Conflict resolution is an important process component of collaborative practice; yet, it was only mentioned in a few of the guidelines. Future guidelines should be evidence informed and provide outcome indicators in order to measure if the collaborative practice is occurring in the practice setting.
Highlights
Over the past two decades, the health care system has undergone a significant transformation which has required that all team members work to their full scope of practice
In order to practice to full scope, registered nurses (RNs) and registered/ licensed practical nurses (R/LPNs) are required to work together using a collaborative practice model of care to meet the needs of complex patients [1]
Findings e 10 documents retrieved from the original search represented practice guidelines from seven Canadian provinces, a staff mix decision-making framework published by the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) [21], and two practice guidelines published by the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario [15, 24] with the latter being a revision of an earlier version
Summary
Over the past two decades, the health care system has undergone a significant transformation which has required that all team members work to their full scope of practice. In order to practice to full scope, registered nurses (RNs) and registered/ licensed practical nurses (R/LPNs) are required to work together using a collaborative practice model of care to meet the needs of complex patients [1]. Collaboration in the context of health care delivery is described as working together with one or more members of the health care team with each member making a unique contribution toward achieving a common goal [3]. Collaboration between team members from the same profession is referred to as intraprofessional collaboration [3], and among nurses, it is viewed as a relational process between colleagues who share common professional education, values, socialization, identity, and experience [4]. Engaging in collaborative practice is a professional expectation and is a required competency for all categories/designations of nurses in many countries [5,6,7,8]
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