Question

To What extent do you think the force of law can change the silo practices of nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and other healthcare providers? Identify other approaches that might be successful in changing the silo practice of healthcare professionals

Answer 1

The silo practice in healthcare is indeed important issue to be taken into serious consideration. The division inside a healthcare organizations between the nurses, physicians, pharmacists, etc does have major barriers to communicate, coordination, collaborations which directly impacts the effective of healthcare delivery and patient safety. The silo practice has its roots deep seated and would require persistent efforts in terms of government policy formulation and implementation into laws to dilute the silo practice. Not with a swift carpet law but a gradual change implementation can indeed lwadnto dissolution of the silo practice in healthcare and help with better delivery mechanisms and patient safety for the entire healthcare industry. The following are the approaches that might be successful in changing the silo practice of healthcare professionals:

1. Multi-departmental review committees - To addres the silo practice webhave to have the review committee who cover all the individual representatives such as in nurses, physicians, pharmacists, laboratory, etc with equal representation and equal voting and view explaining powers. Only then the review can be deemed effective.

2. Frequently collaborations - Collaborations among the members of all vertical and more importantly horizontal professionals in the organization neesa to be arranged for healthcare delivery and study tasks. This can help with functional and cross section problems and identifying respective solutions

3. Creating equal opportunities and recognition - The silos in healthcare is created in the first place due to inequality in the opportunity distribution and respect to various professional stakeholders such as nurses, pharmacists, etc. By providing a platform to innovate, collaborate and have clear dialogue we can overcome the incumbent issues, communicate problems, misunderstandings and promote mutual respect for all the stakeholders in the healthcare organisations

4. Addressing workprocess and responsibility issues - Most often issues that create silos are due to lack of functioning or errors in workprocess and related problems. By arranging platform to discuss the joint workprocess and expected and actual roles and responsibilities we can identify the underlying issues leading to groupism and rectify the areas with mutual solutions and streamline the workprocess. Also, the exact responsibility mapping and related areas of workprocess can be assigned and carefully managed so as to avoid conflict and confusions.

5. Consensus based decision making - A major area for silos functioning in healthcare is due to unilateral control over decison making and implementation. We need to create a method to manage the organization in such as way that it promotes a consensus based decision making through optimum discussion session on key areas that affect all the stakeholders and arriving at the final implementatiomal descision which is acceptable to all and does not impede or create any silos while functioning in the organization.