Challenges Associated With the Concept of Collaboration

Nurs Midwifery Stud. 2015 June; 4(2): e22153. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17795/nmsjournal22153 Published online 2015 June 27. Discussion Challenges Associated With the Concept of Collaboration 1 2 3 Leila Valizadeh ; Vahid Zamanzadeh ; Alireza Irajpour ; Masoumeh Shohani 4,* 1Department of Pediatrics, Nursing and Midwifery School, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, IR Iran 2Department of Medical and Surgical Nursing, Nursing and Midwifery School, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, IR Iran 3Health Research Centre, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, IR Iran 4Department of Nursing, Faculty of Allied Medical Sciences, Ilam University of Medical Sciences, Ilam, IR Iran *Corresponding author: Masoumeh Shohani, Department of Nursing, Faculty of Allied Medical Sciences, Ilam University of Medical Sciences, Ilam, IR Iran. Tel: +98-8432227114; +98-9188426498, Fax: +98-8432227114, E-mail: shohani-m@medilam.ac.ir Received: July 18, 2014; Revised: September 27, 2014; Accepted: March 16, 2015 1. Introduction, Arguments for In recent years, the concept of inter professional collaboration in the health system has attracted huge interest due to the impact it has on quality of care and its outcomes (1). Researchers referred collaboration as hard word, complicated, confusing and contradictory in conceptualization, so that the concept has vaguely been used (2). Ambiguity in the meaning of collaboration has prevented its benefits as a variable in studies that meant to investigate its efficacy (3). Given that lack of clarity has led to use of different forms of the concept in research and in practice (4) and this ambiguity may have led to inconsistency of reports by health system employees on the level of collaboration in clinical settings (5). 2. Arguments Against Literature indicates that there is no commonly accepted definition for collaboration (6), and it has lost its definition complexity as a concept because of excessive use, which has led to incorrect and different understanding among healthcare authorities and medical workers (7). Based on literature review, lack of clear definition, consensus and coordination between researchers and scholars in relation to the concept of collaboration is the main challenge. The researches and multiple attempts were performed to define the concept of collaboration, its structure and dimensions, similar concepts, importance and benefits. Despite of the efforts taken, achieving the concept of collaboration, its characteristics and features are still facing with problems. The multiple definitions have led to insufficient understanding and lack of presenting a formal definition on the concept of collaboration (8), so that despite numerous studies conducted on collaboration, the concept of collaboration has been replaced by the other terms including communication, team work, and partnership. The ambiguity in the definition of the collaboration concept led to another challenge, existence of numerous properties and character- istics in literature. So that, multiple definitions include a wide array of messages that imply attributes to describe this concept. Despite this diversity cannot decide which one exactly related to the concept of collaboration. Regarding the existing disagreements over the definition of collaboration, it could be said that the main issue is the absence of a precise theory on collaboration in the field of health care. Existing theories about collaboration in other fields such as sociology, psychology, management, and business have been used to support collaboration in the fields of health care. In terms of organizational, managerial, and operational view, these professions are different from health care professions (9). Finally, inadequate understanding of the concept has led the tools used in this field cannot define and measure collaboration (10). In addition, these tools focus on approaches, satisfaction of collaboration between physicians and nurses in specific environments, and using tools to measure the other concepts such as communication, team work, autonomy, authority, performance control and attitude (11) caused more difficulties for the studies on collaboration. 3. Evaluation Challenges mentioned in relation to the collaboration concept led to difficulty in achieving proper definition and understanding of this concept. 4. Recommendation According to the evaluation using strategies, such as attempt to provide an appropriate definition of concept by doing qualitative research and represent the theory associated with collaboration derived from actual data by conducting qualitative research are recommended. Acknowledgements This article is part of a nursing PhD thesis. Authors wish Copyright © 2015, Kashan University of Medical Sciences. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited. Valizadeh L et al. to express their thanks to Tabriz University of Medical Sciences for funding this project. Authors’ Contributions Study design was performed by Vahid Zamanzadeh, Leila Valizadeh, Alireza Irajpour, and Masoumeh Shohani. 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