Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective Journal

Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective Journal
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Professional Capstone and Practicum Reflective Journal
Interprofessional Collaboration
Interprofessional collaboration is where two or more health workers from dissimilar professional backgrounds work together with caregivers, communities, patients, and their families to deliver high-quality care. Healthcare providers contribute their unique knowledge and skills in a cooperative atmosphere to improve clinical and patient outcomes. Interprofessional collaboration is not a new concept. Various healthcare agencies have repeatedly stressed the importance of different healthcare professionals working together to enhance care for individual patients and community populations (Green & Johnson, 2015). In addition, partnerships between clinicians present opportunities for effective implementation and improvement of hand hygiene programs.
A robust hand hygiene program in any healthcare institution requires the cooperation of all healthcare professionals. A collaborative culture and effective technological and communication strategies are critical to improving hand hygiene compliance among healthcare workers. Health hygiene is considered an effective preventive measure against healthcare-associated infection, a primary cause of mortality and morbidity in healthcare centers. Interprofessional collaboration in hand hygiene programs is bound to reduce preventable healthcare infections, decrease morbidity and mortality rates, and improve hand hygiene practices among carers (Shobowale et al., 2016).
The healthcare sector entails an array of healthcare facilities, clinicians, insurers, and purchasers of healthcare services, all functioning in different configurations of networks, groups, and independent practices. Some of these actors are based in the private sector, others in the public sector, while others operate as not-for-profit practices. The healthcare sector also entails both voluntary and governmental regulators. All these different organizations and individuals are collectively referred to as the healthcare delivery system, and collaboration and systems planning are incidental to their operations. In addition, America's healthcare system is faced with the challenge of combating preventable healthcare-associated infections, which increase associated morbidity and mortality rates and the cost of treatment.
Healthcare-associated infections have drawn increasing attention from patients, clinicians, insurers, and regulatory bodies because of the increasing severity of illness and cost of treatment. As a result, Healthcare delivery and clinical systems are gradually reversing to hand hygiene to combat cross-transmission of infection in healthcare institutions. Hand hygiene protocols have been shown to reduce healthcare costs, mortality, and morbidity rates arising from preventable hospital-acquired infections.
The ethical considerations in healthcare include respecting the patient's choices, acting in the best interests of the patient, valuing the patient's beliefs and culture, acting lawfully with all patients, being trustworthy and honoring patient commitments, maintaining doctor-patient confidentiality, and truth-telling grounded in respect and autonomy (Haddad & Geiger, 2020). They must also ensure that all confidential information, such as medical records, is protected. Moreover, physicians and nurses must ensure that they provide accurate treatment and have the patient's best interests at heart.
The benefits and burdens of care must also be distributed across society. Preventing healthcare-acquired infections through hand hygiene practices aligns with the ethical considerations of beneficence and nonmaleficence. Hand hygiene is an action that ensures that patients are protected from healthcare-acquired infections and that they are not harmed from nosocomial infections. As a result, hand hygiene is a critical aspect of ethical considerations in healthcare.
Culturally sensitive care is defined as respectful of the beliefs, values, and principles of different groups of patients that share a common cultural heritage, racial, linguistic, national, and religious background. It entails offering healthcare services in a way relevant to the expectations and needs of a diverse patient population. Culturally sensitive care considers the cultural factors that affect healthcare delivery, including communication styles, attitudes, language, behaviors, and beliefs. Culturally competent care encompasses racial and ethnic differences and includes marginalized populations with similar ethnic and racial characteristics as the provider but who are likely to face discrimination and stigmatization.
These populations include persons living with disabilities and people who identify as transgender, homosexual, intersex, and queer. Religious faith and culture strongly affect hand hygiene behavior by influencing compliance with best practices among healthcare providers. Inherent and elective hand hygiene practices are affected by cultural and religious factors because cleaning one’s hands often takes hygienic and ritualistic significance. In some cultures, there are specific rules for handwashing, with some cultures place greater emphasis on spiritual and physical cleanliness (Allegranzi et al., 2009). Moreover, some healthcare workers are averse to alcohol-based hand rubs because of their religious concerns about coming into contact with alcohol. All these cultural nuances must be taken into consideration when implementing hand hygiene protocols in healthcare institutions.
In the healthcare setting, human dignity refers to such aspects as respect, privacy, and autonomy. Certain care episodes can erode the patient’s sense of self-worth and self-respect. The healthcare professional has to ensure that human dignity is preserved throughout the continuum of care. Clinicians must respect the patient's modesty in all interactions and remain sensitive to the patient's demographic and special circumstances (Kadivar et al., 2018). They must refrain from stereotypes and negative assumptions by maintaining respectful communications with all patients.
Ensuring the integrity of human dignity in the care of all patients also involves respecting patients' choices: patient autonomy is a critical facet of preserving the identity and value of patients as human beings. Part of empowering patients to contribute to their care is to remind healthcare providers to clean their hands. Patients can help increasing clinician compliance with hand hygiene regulations. Healthcare providers are often so busy that they forget to wash their hands before attending to patients. Empowering patients to remind carers about handwashing protocols is part of respecting their dignity while preventing healthcare-acquired infections.
Effective healthcare requires going beyond thinking about the individual health status of individuals to investing in public health. Improving population health involves changing system health problems, which often involve an array of social, economic, and political factors. Personal health is only one of the determinants of public health. Addressing health population issues involves addressing disparities in access to quality treatment services as the subject of government support. Public health also entails saf...