Connectedness Among Practitioners

As a registered social worker on an inpatient mental health unit, my role interacts with other disciplines such as psychiatry, pharmacy, nursing, occupational therapy, recreation therapy, and dietitians. These roles all connect to approach the patient from a biopsychosocial framework to ensure socio-environmental factors are included in a patient’s treatment experience, in addition to biology and psychology. Approaching the patient from a biopsychosocial lens contributes to improving the quality of service provided, and assessing the patients’ health outside the singular medical model. These roles influence each other tremendously, as we are required to collaborate together with regard to supporting the best treatment outcomes for patients and their families. We are all experts in our field, and connect with our clinical opinions specific to our scope. When we interpret these individual clinical opinions, this may influence or change our perspective. This signifies the importance of removing one’s personal opinions, and ensuring things are not overlooked to provide the patient with the best care. Through this interdisciplinary approach, we are frequently communicating with each other to provide assessment information, mental status updates, and observations around patient behaviours. This is done in a formal setting during conferences, and also during informal settings such as conversations in the charting room or phone calls. All of these health care professionals document their findings and clinical opinions in our electronic health record systems as well. This is another way we are connected, as we all have access to this information, and read and use this information to make decisions around patient care. I value the connectedness amongst my colleagues as it encourages continual growth, learning, and leads me to challenge myself at times.

The feedback received from the many disciplines involved in my MHST 601around connectedness was insightful and informative. Despite some disciplines not having direct intimate day to day contact with social work, it was identified that involvement between disciplines still occurs at times, on the periphery of patient or client experience. A lesson learned around how malleable and imprecise our health care systems and patient trajectory can be at times.

Here is a link to my Flipboard with a curation of content for resources about connectedness among practitioners in my area: Connectedness Among Practitioners | @MarthaPierc2022 (flipboard.com)