17: INTERDISCIPLINARY AND INTERPROFESSIONAL COLLABORATION ■ 399settings if health care’s 17% gross national product is to be reduced, and significant
improvements are to be made and sustained.
■ DEVELOPING INTERDISCIPLINARY PARTNERSHIPS
FOR DNP PROGRAM ENRICHMENT
ACADEMIC
The academic patient safety’s call- to- arms occurred in 2003 when the IOM published Health
Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality (IOM, 2003). Initially, the education report did not
benefit from the media exposure of the earlier reports; education is not as sensational as lost
lives reported in To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System (IOM, 2000). The root cause
to any problem or issue is complex. The revolution in health care must not lose momen-
tum in solving fundamental education- related patient safety, quality, and systems issues.
Education as a root cause of these issues is losing lives once- removed (Rapala & Novak,
2007). The lack of effective collaboration and communication leads to errors, added costs,
patient dissatisfaction, unfulfilled community partnerships, and unsustainability.
In addition to a common patient safety language, the IOM multidisciplinary team
suggested a group of five core competencies that should be incorporated into the cur-
riculum of all health care education programs. The five competencies include the abil-
ity to: (a) provide patient- centered care; (b) work in interdisciplinary teams; (c) employ
EBP; (d) apply quality improvement (QI); and (e) use informatics (IOM, 2003). The
recommendations from this report have been further delineated in federal and foun-
dation requests for proposals (RFPs), health care publications, and the popular press.
The IOM Future of Nursing Report’s (2010) recommendations further clarified the call
to action including: (a) Nurses should practice to the full extent of their education and
training; (b) achieve higher levels of education and training (remove APN practice bar-
riers); (c) be full partners with physicians and others in redesigning health care in the
United States; and (d) recognize that effective workforce planning and policy- making
require better data collection and an improved information infrastructure.
If nurses are to be effective, transformative, innovative collaborators and team
leaders, attention must also be paid to individual identity development as professionals
(Charles, Bainbridge, & Gilbert, 2010). Professional identity development is dependent
on interactions with the world around us. Student experiences across the curriculum
must be designed with this in mind. Bookend leadership and IPE courses at the begin-
ning and end of DNP programs are insufficient.
Just as it is difficult for health care providers to respond to and balance a myriad
of patient safety issues from medication reconciliation to information systems imple-
mentation, it is difficult for nursing academe to balance patient safety with operations,
research, and teaching (Rapala & Novak, 2007). All IOM reports serve as a blueprint for
change. Removal of scope of practice barriers was the first and specific recommendation
of the IOM future of nursing report (2010).
Competencies related to the DNP essentials (AACN, 2006), Quality, Safety, and
Education of Nurses (Cronenwett et al., 2007) are teamwork, collaboration, EBP, QI, safety,
and informatics, and Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety
(TeamSTEPPS) (AHRQ, 2016 ) must be woven into the curriculum to address these core chal-
lenges. The TeamSTEPPS initiative is based on evidence derived from team performance,
leveraging more than 30 years of research in military, aviation, nuclear power, business, and
industry, to acquire team competencies. These team competencies affect knowledge (shared
mental model), attitudes (mutual trust and team orientation), and performance (adaptability,