‘Collaboration’ has been promoted as an approach for improving health care so often that it risks becoming a cliché. Its proponents believe collaboration increases efficiency, enhances patient satisfaction and produces high-quality services. However, the collaboration experiences of many patients and clinicians often fall short of expectation.
The reason is rarely collaboration itself, but rather ‘why’ and ‘how’ we choose to collaborate.
According to Matessich and Monsey, collaboration is ‘a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more individuals or organisations to achieve common goals’.
This simple definition provides the three key characteristics of valuable collaborations: benefits, goals and relationships.
Collaboration enables us to achieve unique outcomes that we cannot produce by ourselves. Our collective performance must have the potential to exceed the performance of even the best individual for collaboration to be beneficial.
Effective collaboration requires us to share a clear vision but work towards achieving it in a flexible manner – we need to set our goals in proverbial concrete but make our plans in sand. Unlike teamwork, collaboration should not have a hierarchy and participants should be encouraged to contribute according to their ability.
Relationships are essential for successful collaboration. When ‘I’ is replaced by ‘we’, even illness becomes wellness. When we collaborate, we are remined that ‘our most useful asset is not a head full of knowledge, but a heart full of love, an ear ready to listen and a hand willing to help’ – and these characteristics form the cornerstone of general practice.