Health And Social Care Professionals

A large body of experience and research provides clear evidence about many of the key determinants of successful partnerships. The focus is to achieve better outcomes through improved service delivery. Partnership working has come a long way in recent years. There is now a consensus that effective partnership working is essential in order to design, develop and deliver personal services for those requiring support and assistance to optimise their independence and happiness. The most important features of an effective partnership are engaging the right people and ensuring they function as a genuine team.

Partnership is when two or more organisations work together, showing cooperation and collaboration. This can provide better care and support for service users. For example, different funds working together, instead of working individually and stressing. Another example, a social worker and the health visitor will need to work together, share ideas and use different skills to develop a support plan that will benefit children and families. This also promotes multi-disciplinary working. Partnership thus can reduce conflicts and enhance team working skills as professionals can work together, sharing responsibilities and ensuring need led approaches are met and set. This can be done by reviewing care plans and offering support.

Multi-Agency working is carried out by health professionals from different sectors and professions such as nurses, social workers and mid wives working together to achieve a common goal. Multi-Agency working ensures additional support is provided for service users and that they have the correct professionals working to support

Collaboration is a process in which a nurse practitioner has a relationship with one or more physicians to deliver health care services. Such collaboration is to be evidenced by nurse practitioners documenting the nurse practitioners’ scope of practice and indicating the relationships that they have with physicians to deal with issues outside their scope of practice. Nurse practitioners must document this collaborative process with physicians. The collaborating physician does not need to be present with the nurse practitioner when the services are furnished or to make an independent evaluation of each patient who is seen by the nurse practitioner.

The features of effective partnership working are to ensure there is good communication between all parties that ensure a high standard of care is delivered to the individual involved at all times. It ensures each party is covering all area’s and that all needs are met and that all partys have a good knowledge of who is delivering what to the individual and the contacts they have if other issues may arise and the access they have to these.

Interprofessional working includes multi-agency working, multi-professional working and inter-agency practice. They all involve professionals working together, in order to meet the service users and their family’s needs. Sometimes collaborative working can come with barriers, such as communication and hierarchical power, but they can be overcame. Even though there are sometimes barriers, there are also importance to collaborative working. These importance are beneficial for the professionals when working, but also for the service users and their families, when identifying their

Collaborative practice (Sadler 2004) is at the forefront of health and social care training. For me, like many nursing students, the first steps in collaborative practice were the IPL (interprofessional learning) modules at university. This has been described as two or more professions being taught together as away of cultivating collaborative practice (Caipe. 2010). These modules consisted of student nurses studying different fields, OT’s, radiographers and midwifes. This was the first opportunity I had to meet other professions, who as in any project are the ones who collaborate not the institutions (UKCR 2007). Since then all the IPL modules I have completed have been with adult nursing

The essence of a partnership is that it is collaboration amongst equals, with the recognition that by working

Collaborative relationships are based on working with another or group in cooperation to achieve a goal (Dictionary.com, 2015). It is important to collaborate with colleagues and peers in the health care team. Working as a team is critical to getting all the different views of the team members and allowing them to express their ideas. Furthermore, each team member should using open communication, shared decision making and mutual respect (Riley, 2014). They must understand that each stakeholder's scope of practise is different among the different authorities and disciplines. Lastly, transparent communication is paramount when dealing with each stakeholder (Riley, 2014).

According to Smith (2015), collaborative working promotes shared interest, common vision, goal and commitment. On the other hand, if there is no collaboration it may lead to safeguarding issues and possibility death of service users (Collins & McCray, 2012). Lord Francis (Department of Health, 2013) reported that poor collaborative working at the Mid Staffordshire National Health Service leads to systemic failure consequently leading to poor care of the service users at the hospital. Lord Francis recommends that, the National Health Service should put service user care first.

Inter professional working is formed from different health and social care professionals working together towards a common goal to meet the needs of a service user. It is about developing relationships within and between organisations and services involved in planning and delivering care and support to the service users we support. By working collaboratively it brings together different types of professionals to share their particular knowledge, experience, skills, occupational values and perspectives to improve service

For instance, when two different professionals, such as carers and nurses, work together in a team as a form of partnership work, certain responsibilities in professional conduct or perspectives could differ from each other. In this case, these two different parties should reach to an agreement of shared objectives within the team in relation to work delegation balancing the possession of power, and be open to constructive feedback and ideas through developing a frank partnership relationship (Department of Health (DH), 2004).

Collaboration is a substantive idea repeatedly discussed in health care circles. The benefits are well validated. The focus on benefits of collaboration could lead one to think that collaboration is a favorite approach to providing patient care, leading organizations, educating future health professionals, and conducting health care research.

Public health requires the collaboration of all healthcare providers. Interdependent means health care providers are a part of a team that cooperates with each other to provide high-quality patient care. All team members are dependent on each other, and responsible for their action and the patient’s wellbeing. On the other hand, independent means that health care practitioners can practice independently within their scope of practice. Health care practitioners make decisions and provide care based on their knowledge and patient situation, therefore, they are personally responsible and accountable for all their actions.

Social workers and health care professionals are conveniently positioned to recognize and intervene in cases regarding financial elder abuse. An evidence-based educational intervention was established to aid practitioners in their decision-making regarding this epidemic. The objective was to test the effectiveness of a decision-training educational intervention on professionals new to the field and their ability to detect elder financial abuse (Harries et al, 2014).