'The culture of individual professions can present barriers to Essay

'The culture of individual professions can present barriers to interprofessional working.' Discuss with reference to your clinical experience - Essay Example We also had people coming from different professions including social service, general practice, billing and insurance. Each of these areas has a different way of dealing with a patient and sometimes they come into conflict because they have different rules. Interprofessional working brings together these elements to find the common grounds where they can effectively collaborate and become more flexible and skilled towards meeting the patients needs (British Medical Association 2005, par.1). When these factors come together, the team is able to more affectively cross "traditional" roles and find ways to substitute roles within the framework of working together. These are the major challenges to interprofessional working and they create barriers to the patient. A study done by Elston and Holloway (2006, p. 20) showed the potential conflict between three different groups: nurses, managers and general practitioners. When asked what "interprofessional working" meant to each group, they found that GPs and managers were focused on their individual practices while nurses were able to see the relationships between all professions. The study further found that GPs thought they were ultimately responsible for everything in the study and nurse practitioners tended to work as doctors in the primary care setting. Managers saw an overall idea of the group than other practitioners. †¦between the different professions there are different priorities, GPs and nurses tend to focus on different aspects†¦I think it is going to be quite a challenge, but if it works them you could end up with something better, you could end up with a real representative view. (Nurse 2 as cited in Elston and Holloway p. 21). This nurse also pointed out that there would be challenges with understanding the differences between educational backgrounds and the socialisation process that lead to