Integrative collaboration refers to the joining of effort by health professionals to provide complete treatment to patients and improve their overall well-being. Integrative collaboration looks at models, clinical pathways and perspectives that bring the efforts of health professionals together. Integrative collaboration differs from one health care to another due to the settings of the hospital and participants in the healthcare system. In the context of collaborative integration, this paper will discuss how integrative collaboration can be used to improve standard precautions that will control health care-associated infections in a small rural hospital setting.
To begin with, health care-associated infections abbreviated as HAIs are an infection that patients get while receiving treatments that require surgery or medication in a health care setting (Khan, Mendel, Weinberg, Leuschner, Gall & Siegel, 2013). HAIs are a health problem in both developed and developing countries. The high number of worldwide deaths caused by HAIs results from barriers and challenges facing integrative collaboration.
The main barriers facing integrative collaboration include challenges of definition and awareness of each other’s role and components. As stated, health care is made up of several participants. The failure to define the role of each is a barrier in integrating collaboration to reduce HAIs. Other challenges include confidentiality and responsibility, shared information, lack of teamwork, long-term funding and joint monitoring.
These challenges and barriers, however, can be addressed through several strategies. First, health care personnel should be trained in accordance with the standard precautions established nationally (World Health Organization, 2010). Secondly, there should be constant surveillance that the combined health practices of the team are in compliance with the prevention and control practices. Finally, health professionals should organize infection and prevention programs within hospital settings.
While an integrative collaboration and how it can be applied to prevent and reduce HAIs it is worth to note the evidence of hierarchy that each article used lies. The article entitled Infection prevention and control in health care: time for collaborative action, lies in the Randomized Control Trials.
The article infers this type of classification because of the random surveys that were conducted in 55 hospitals across 14 countries. Additionally, the study has synthesized the results from the 55 random trials and increased the overall credibility such that it can be used by scholars in the study of integrative collaboration.
The second Article, National Action Plan to Prevent HAIs: Roadmap to Elimination is classified under Background information or rather an expert opinion in the hierarchy of evidence. The article does not reveal any study that was conducted, or any hypothesis tested. The article only gives information about the topic. The information does not have a meta-analysis, but it provides answers to several questions.
The article is based on several studies that were identified in literature searches. For instance, the number of deaths taking place because of HAIs is recorded in the article to be over 28 million. This does not indicate that the author conducted actual research but rather they integrated information from other literature searches to come up with that figure.
The final article; improving adherence to Standard Precautions for the control of healthcare-associated infections, falls under the Randomized Control Trials in the hierarchy of evidence. It infers this classification because the method used in sample selection was both randomized and clusters randomized trials. Additionally, the data was collected from eligible trials and risks bias for each study assessed. That indicates that this article has minimal errors. Besides a randomized control trial can be with or without a meta-analysis. For this study on HA1S a meta-analysis was not warranted and therefore the certainty of evidence was assessed using GRADE and presented in a table of findings.
Most healthcare-associated infections can be prevented when changes are made. Changes to be made are such as having collaborative integration in having effective control programs. Furthermore, research reveals that in an overview of published reports the rates of HAIs can be prevented when the professionals in health care put teamwork into implementing those changes (Moralejo, El Dib, Prata, Barretu & Correa, 2018).
Additionally, for patients to accept the kind of proposed changes aimed at preventing HAIs the participants must collaborate. It is through utter collaboration that these changes can be implemented. Collaboration is dependent on acceptance of change. The professionals first must collectively agree on the measures to take for them to collaborate into implementing those changes.
For integrative collaboration to be effective trust must be cultivated. As mentioned earlier, one of the barriers to integrative collaboration is confidentiality. Health professionals must prove themselves to be trustworthy by their colleagues. Since healthcare workers are responsible for most data in the health care system, they should practice confidentiality and at times transparency. It is only through such measures that integrative collaboration can be achieved hence improvement on the precautions taken to prevent HAIs.
In conclusion, integrative collaboration has impacted on health care, particularly HAIs in several ways. First, coordination has resulted in a more organized manner of attending to patients. This has led to a decrease in the number of HAIs. Additionally, integrative collaboration has led to the organization and development of national programs aimed at preventing and control of infection and improving the quality of care for patients. No matter how many times education regarding the importance of standard precautions is given, it still seems as though compliance can prove to be an issue in certain settings.
References
- Kahn, K. L., Mendel, P., Weinberg, D. A., Leuschner, K. J., Gall, E. M., & Siegel, S. (2013). Approach for conducting the longitudinal program evaluation of the US Department of Health and Human Services National Action Plan to prevent healthcare-associated infections: a roadmap to elimination. Medical care, 52, S9-S16.
- Moralejo, D., El Dib, R., Prata, R. A., Barretti, P., & Corrêa, I. (2018). Improving adherence to Standard Precautions for the control of health care‐associated infections. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (2).
- World Health Organization. (2010). Technical paper Infection prevention and control in health care: time for collaborative action.
