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Week 10 Practicum Journal: Collaborative Practice to Promote Shared Decision-Making

            In this week, I continue to reflect on the importance of collaborative practice; especially within the context of promotion of shared decision-making. In my practice experience, I observed that team leaders and relatively more experienced and senior staff were prone to involve the patient in question in decision making process. Alternatively, a surrogate decision maker was involved in cases whereby the patient was incapacitated. However, the patients were far more the regarded as secondary in the decision-making process since communication was dominantly one-way, from the healthcare providers to the patients. The patient should be fuly engaged in making of decisions that affect them (Entwistle, Cribb, & Watt, 2012). Beyene et al. (2018) stresses that expert knowledge and the patient’s position should all take the center-stage in shared decision-making process. Collaborative facilitates prioritization of the focus of treatment for a given patient (Hargraves & Montori, 2014). As such, I will advocate for a slight change in practice to improve the level of patient engagement in shared decision-making process compared to the current situation.

            I do strive to improve my team-working and collaborative skills so at to add value to the shared decision-making process. Since I motivated to provide service to the elderly and geriatric patients, I believe that safe and high quality care will be the product of the shared decision-making process. My plan is to continue working and collaborating with others in practice to gain more experience in collaborative practice as well as to identify my weaknesses and strengths. Hence, I will be able to reinforce my strengths and work to resolve my weaknesses.