Health Services > Physician-Nurse Collaboration
Physician-Nurse Collaboration
For further information contact: Mohammadreza.Hojat@jefferson.edu
Inter-professional collaboration between physicians and nurses-- defined as
a complementary inter-dependent relationship-- is important to improving clinical
outcomes, increasing patients' satisfaction, and containing the cost of health
care. Such collaboration could also contribute to counter some of the perceived
negative effects of the changing health care system. Current emphasis in medical
and nursing education on teamwork and inter-disciplinary approaches, and efforts
directed to developing programs for promoting a strong inter-professional alliance,
call for an operational measure of attitudes towards physician-nurse collaboration
with satisfactory psychometric properties. In response to this call, we developed
the Jefferson Scale of Attitudes Toward Physician-Nurse Collaboration. This
scale (15 Likert-type items completed by health professionals) supported by
psychometric evidence including construct validity and internal consistency
reliability, that can be used as a research or evaluative tool. In a recent
cross-cultural study, we compared male and female physicians and nurses in the
United States and Mexico on their scores on this attitude scale. The scale has
received a wide attention indicated by the number of request to use it in the
United States and abroad. The scale has been translated into Spanish, Italian,
Chinese, Turkish, and Hebrew, and at the present time is being used in studies
on inter-professional collaboration by researchers in Mexico, Italy, China,
Turkey, and Israel.
Selected Readings
1. Hojat, M. Fields, S.K., Veloski, J.J., Griffiths, M., Cohen, M.J.M., &
Plumb, J.D. Psychometric properties of an attitude scale measuring physician-nurse
collaboration. Evaluation & the Health Professions, 1999; 22 (2): 208-220.
2. Hojat, M., Fields, S. K., Rattner, S. L., Griffiths, M., Cohen, M.J.M., &
Plumb, K. M. Attitudes towards physician-nurse alliance: Comparisons of medical
and nursing students. Academic Medicine (supplement), 1997; 72: S1-S3.
3. Hojat, M. & Herman, MM. W. Developing an instrument to measure attitudes
toward nurses: Preliminary psychometric findings. Psychological Reports,1985;
56: 571-579.
4. Hojat, M., Nasca, T.J., Cohen, M. J. M., Fields, S.K., Rattner, S.L., Griffiths,
M., Ibarra, D., Alcorta-G de Gonzalez, A., Torres-Ruiz, A., Ibarra, G., &
Garcia, A. Attitudes toward physician-nurse collaboration: A cross-cultural
study of male and female physicians and nurses in the United States and Mexico.
Nursing Research, 2001; 50(2):123-128.
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