SNPG917 Evidence Into Practice

What is Interprofessional Practice?

• Inter-professional practice is a collaborative approach addressed by the health care providers, that enables them to work with various stakeholders of health care system.

• These stakeholders of health care work with people belonging to their own professional field, along with people from outside of the medical field, together with the patients and their families (Floyd & Morrison, 2014).

• This is a significant part of providing an accessible and quality health care resulting in a leading change and overall advancement of health care system.

Outline of Patient situation

The present situation reports a 56 year old male patient who has had extensive myocardial infarction, resulting in two incidents of stroke. He also suffers from obesity and has high blood pressure. The patient is currently under cardiac rehabilitation. He is advised to lose weight and maintain his BP through proper diet, medication and exercise.

Therefore, from this scenario it is evident that the patient entails treatment for the following issues:

• Cardiac disease

• Hypertension
• Obesity

Role of the Health Professionals

Role of the Exercise Physiologist

• Exercise physiologists are allied health care professionals, specializing in exercise and movement for preventing and managing various chronic diseases.

• Exercise physiologists are different from physiotherapists, in that they usually deal with patients who require long-term management of a chronic disease. Whereas, physiotherapists treat patients who suffer from acute injuries.

• Exercise physiologists administer exercise as a solution or a form of treatment for their patients.

Role of the Health Professionals

Role of the Dietician

• Dieticians work together with the patients in order to improve the patient situation by stabilizing their eating patterns, optimizing the patient’s dietary intakes and ensuring that their nutritional requirements are being met according to their age and health condition.

• Dieticians are part of a multidisciplinary framework that assesses the patient’s medical needs and provide adequate interventions in order to promote a healthy and positive patient outcome.

• Clinically, following a proper diet is the most cost-effective way of managing obesity.

Contribution of the Health Professionals

Exercise Physiologist

• Exercise physiologists provide the much-needed support for the people who suffer from obesity and cardio-vascular diseases. They help analyzing the fitness of their patient in order to help them stay healthy. By following a proper framework of exercise, they help patients with cardiac diseases and other chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity, to regain their health.

• Engaging in physical activity helps people to lose weight through energy expenditure. Some specific exercises tend to decrease the fat around the lower abdominal region and total body fat of individuals, thus slows down the accumulation of excessive fat and stops the development of obesity (Mayne, Auchincloss & Michael, 2015).

Contribution of the Health Professionals

Dietician

• Following a specific diet pattern help reduce the chances of myocardial infarction and help prevent heart diseases.

• To stabilize the blood pressure of the patient, the dietician recommended that the patient’s diet must contain sufficient amount of fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy products, along with completely avoiding foods that are high in cholesterol, trans fat and saturated fat.

• Eating foods that are rich in fiber, such as fruits, vegetables and cereals provides the feeling of fulfillment without adding up to the calories. Thereby, dieticians highly recommend such a well-balanced high fiber diet for people with obesity (Aaron & Sanders, 2013).

Communication between the Nurse and the Health Professionals

Identifying the Types of Information

• Cardiac rehab is a program that provides medical supervision for people who suffer from heart diseases and have had past experiences of heart attacks, failures or surgeries.

• Patients who undergo cardiac rehab, result in modified eating habits and behavior, through proper nutritional care (Ades et al., 2013).

• According to the dietician, avoiding junk foods and processed foods, switching to non-fat dairy products, consuming foods rich in natural fats such as nuts, seeds, avocado, fish, soy or olives and having a variety of oils such as extra virgin olive oil and canola oil greatly reduces the chances of recurrence of heart attacks, stabilizes blood pressure and helps to lose weight.

• According to the exercise physiologist, in order to achieve a healthy body weight the patient must undergo a long-term treatment based on specific exercises, that will eventually help him develop a healthy blood pressure and regain his normal cardiac functions.

Barriers to Effective Inter-professional Practice

• The information exchange process between the two health professionals were not timely managed

• The organizational structure regarding education and administration hierarchy did not encourage the inter-professional collaboration and hampered the medical practice (Reeves et al., 2013).

• There were times when the health professionals lacked knowledge as well as appreciation for each other

• They also faced some discomfort while being reviewed by their team members who belonged to different professional backgrounds

Strategies to Overcome the Barriers

• In order to achieve the major goal of inter-professional collaborative practice that entails a positive patient outcome, a genuine commitment must be developed from both the health professionals

• Developing the fundamental knowledge regarding other medical professionals and their necessity

• Giving respect to other medical professionals, by acknowledging their expertise and knowledge

• Establishing a positive attitude towards their own field

• Development of trust and faith between the members of an inter-professional practice

• The patient suffered from chronic cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure and obesity.

• To address the patient’s issues the health professionals required were a exercise physiologist and a dietician.

• The cardiac rehabilitation program aims to provide overall care for patients with cardiovascular diseases. This is a preventive program which is recognized as an essential part of patient care (Anderson et al., 2016).

• Proper exercise and an appropriate diet plan is the prerequisite to a positive patient outcome.

References

Aaron, K. J., & Sanders, P. W. (2013, September). Role of dietary salt and potassium intake in cardiovascular health and disease: a review of the evidence. In Mayo Clinic Proceedings(Vol. 88, No. 9, pp. 987-995). Elsevier.

Ades, P. A., Keteyian, S. J., Balady, G. J., Houston-Miller, N., Kitzman, D. W., Mancini, D. M., & Rich, M. W. (2013). Cardiac rehabilitation exercise and self-care for chronic heart failure. JACC: Heart failure, 1(6), 540-547.

Anderson, L., Oldridge, N., Thompson, D. R., Zwisler, A. D., Rees, K., Martin, N., & Taylor, R. S. (2016). Exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation for coronary heart disease: Cochrane systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 67(1), 1-12.

Floyd, A., & Morrison, M. (2014). Exploring identities and cultures in inter-professional education and collaborative professional practice. Studies in continuing education, 36(1), 38-53.

Mayne, S. L., Auchincloss, A. H., & Michael, Y. L. (2015). Impact of policy and built environment changes on obesity? related outcomes: a systematic review of naturally occurring experiments. Obesity Reviews, 16(5), 362-375.

Reeves, S., Perrier, L., Goldman, J., Freeth, D., & Zwarenstein, M. (2013). Interprofessional education: effects on professional practice and healthcare outcomes (update). Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 3(3).