Understanding the nature of interprofessional collaboration and patient family involvement in intensive care settings: A study protocol

Abstract

Although effective interprofessional collaboration is a key component of patient safety and quality improvement initiatives, little is known about the nature of collaboration in ICU settings. Through ethnographic research, this study will explore interprofessional care in 8 ICUs (6 based in the United States and 2 based in Canada), develop an empirically based readiness/diagnostic tool to assess the quality of team-based care delivery, and develop interventions to strengthen team-based care and patient family involvement. Our study has 3 iterative phases and will involve: a scoping review of the literature on team dynamics in the ICU, an ethnographic study (observation, shadowing, interviews) across 8 sites over 2 years and the collection of clinical outcomes data to inform the development of a “diagnostics” tool for interprofessional collaboration and family member involvement in ICU care, as well as interprofessional intervention development. The importance of ethnographic and other forms of qualitative...