Reflections on safety and interprofessional care: Some conceptual approaches

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Notes

1. The term inter-disciplinary care is used here as being equivalent to interprofessional care, although multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary care are related but distinct concepts often used interchangeably with inter-disciplinary care. The distinctions, however, are important: multi-disciplinary care is thought of as the provision of care by a variety of disciplines each using disciplinary-specific concepts and processes ; inter-disciplinary care is the joint or integrated provision of care retaining disciplinary-specific concepts and processes; trans-disciplinary care is thought of as a cognitive combining of disciplinary concepts and processes such that a common mental model of service provision is developed to provide patient care (Rosenfield, [1992]). Trans-disciplinary care can result in what Amalberti et al. ([2005]) call the equivalent actor principle of care (e.g., nurses, social workers and general practitioners having a common conceptualization of hospital discharge planning-any member of the team can do the job). This concept has a particular resonance with regard to patient safety issues.