Learning how to interact with other healthcare professionals

My time doing my Bachelor's degree wasn't yesterday. It's been nearly 19 years since I graduated as a fresh faced registered nurse with very little real life experience in my toolchest.

Since that time I've worked in a variety of different positions and with a variety of other disciplines both in the hospital and in community settings. What I can tell you is that my time in University didn't prepare me for the things I would feel during the many interactions I've had.

I grew up in a place of peace and perhaps a bit of a fairy tale, naive world that didn't let me see that there were things I should and shouldn't do as a nurse when I was in my healthcare capacity. Candice the patient may have felt that physicians and the like were well trained and deserved a sort of bow down respect, but Candice the new nurse assumed that there would be more comradery and mutual appreciation.

Learning from senior nursing staff that when they were younger the nurses lit the doctor's cigarettes, pulled out chairs for them, and followed them around to the patient's bedside left me befuddled and a bit shocked. By the time I had started nursing smoking inside the hospital had long since ceased, and the nursing staff were too busy to chase the doctors around with notepads. What continued though was nurses getting up from their chairs, dropping what they were doing, and often becoming yes sir people when a doctor walked onto a unit.

Fast-forward to my days as an emergency room nurse where the physicians went by their first name, and very often sat right beside you and talked about the pool party you'd all be attending on the weekend.

There was no exact how to manual to understand when it was the appropriate time to look to a physiotherapist, occupational therapist, speech-language pathologist, respiratory therapist, or pharmacist for support, only what you picked up as you went or checked off on stroke pathway. That was complicated by the fact that when I moved to the emergency room I was met by a whole new set of professionals such as paramedics and x-ray technicians and the licensed practical nurses I had adored so much were now more of a support than ever because their scope was more evolved.

What is interesting to reflect on in the posts that have been shared so far about professional accountability and the interaction among disciplines, is that everyone seems to have someone they answer to. Whether they're in a regulated profession where they require a license or whether they work in a supportive or administrative role, people have employment standards and government regulations that often support how they do things.

The other commonalities I noticed in this group is that we are all affected by the working of the healthcare system in Canada. Recently, politics have brought up things like less taxes and better healthcare costs for Canadians. While I can agree that the issues related to accessing primary care, tertiary services, and long term care are challenging, I'm not sure I want to understand healthcare system where everything I partake in is itemized on a paper. Years ago, a coworker who had spent time in the United States talked about considering the use of products related to providing care, when you understood that the costs were coming out of your patient's pockets in some way. You might choose to use less gauze, or avoid opening that tube of lotion if you questioned the need after that.

Even in a healthcare system that sees a large coverage range of services and supports and discourages the privatization of healthcare I still feel we have a long way to go (Flood & Thomas, 2016). People being cared for in our healthcare system are much more unwell than they were in the past and one could question if that's related to the heavy balance of spending done on tertiary services and not on prevention and wellness models.

It's definitely food for though when considering whether the Canada Health Act (Canada Health Act, 2025) still does us the good it did years ago. Maybe learning how to interact with colleagues and other disciplines in a better way is a piece of solving the crisis we have that consists of power struggles and apparent overbilling (Flood & Thomas, 2016).

Canada Health Act. (2025, January 10). Health Canada. Retrieved January 25, 2025, from https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-care-system/canada-health-

care-system-medicare/canada-health-act.html 

Flood, C., & Thomas, B. (2016). Modernizing the Canada Health Act. Dalhousie Law Journal,

39(2), 397. Retrieved January 22, 2025, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

abstract_id=2907029