Effects of interdisciplinary collaboration in hospitals on medication errors: an integrative review

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Medication errors are commonly affected by breakdowns in communication. Interdisciplinary collaboration is an important means of facilitating communication between health professionals in clinical practice. To date, there has been little systematic examination of past research in this area.

Areas covered: The aims of this integrative review are to examine how interdisciplinary collaboration influences medication errors in hospitals, the araes of interdisciplinary collaboration that have been researched in previous work, and recommendations for future research and practice. An integrative review was undertaken of research papers (N = 30) published from inception to August 2017 using MEDLINE, the Cochrane Library, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Embase.

Expert opinion: Five different areas of interdisciplinary collaboration were identified in research involving medication errors. These areas were: communication through tools including guidelines, protocols, and communication logs; participation of pharmacists in interdisciplinary teams; collaborative medication review on admission and at discharge; collaborative workshops and conferences; and complexity of role differentiation and environment. Despite encouraging results demonstrated in past research, medication errors continued to occur. Increased focus is needed on developing tailored, individualized strategies that can be applied in particular contexts to create further reductions in medication errors. Greater understandings are also needed about the changing roles of various disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Medication safety
• medication errors
• interdisciplinary collaboration
• communication
• integrative review

Article highlights

• Interdisciplinary collaboration has an important influence on medication errors, as demonstrated by the close links between medication errors and breakdown in communication.

• There are five different areas of interdisciplinary collaboration identified in past research work: communication through tools including guidelines, protocols, and communication logs; participation of pharmacists in interdisciplinary teams; collaborative medication review on admission and at discharge; collaborative workshops and conferences; and complexity of role differentiation and environment.

• Investigations of interdisciplinary collaboration have mainly focused on interactions between physicians, nurses and pharmacists.

• While past interventions aimed at improving interdisciplinary collaboration have usually led to reductions in medication errors, medication errors continue to occur.

• Involving diverse members of the health care team, such as speech pathologists, social workers and physiotherapists, in addition to physicians, nurses and pharmacists, provide future opportunities for enhanced interdisciplinary collaboration in medication safety.

• Future work is needed on examining tailored approaches to interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly situations involving patients’ movements across transitions of care, and health professionals’ interactions with electronic medical records.

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Declaration of interest

The author have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties. Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This paper has not been funded.