Role of Professional Cultures and Power in Attaining Collective Competence: A Wicked Problem for Collaborative Healthcare Practice

The Role of Professional Cultures and Power in Attaining Collective Competence: A Wicked Problem for Collaborative Healthcare Practice

Date: Friday, 27 September 2024 | Time: 1350 – 1435 | Venue: Academia, The NAK Auditorium
Track Type: Plenary

Speaker: Prof Simon Kitto

Effective interprofessional collaboration amongst healthcare providers is a well-known key component of quality improvement, patient safety and outcomes. Nonetheless, the creation of collaborative models of clinical service delivery that can be successfully implemented in an effective and sustainable manner continues to be a ‘wicked’ problem for healthcare systems around the world. 

Current ways to advance education and research about teams and team effectiveness in healthcare implementation science focus on the need to clarify the definitions of teams and to provide more clarity around team-level constructs.  The focus is on developing strategies targeting individual-level behaviour change and organisation-level structural, process and to a lesser degree, cultural factors. What is neglected is an appreciation of the complex interplay between the diverse healthcare professional cultures in the healthcare system and the power relationships that structure their work. Culture and power dictate the possibility of achieving the ultimate goal: the collective competence of interprofessional collaborations in clinical service delivery. 

In this presentation, the educational theory of collective competence is introduced and applied to case studies of collaborative practice to highlight the need to understand the crucial role of professional culture and power in creating effective collaborative practice environments, craft a roadmap to advance their careers and advance the field as change agents and reflective practitioners.

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