MULTI-PROFESSIONAL HEALTHCARE PROVISION 2

Multi-Professional Healthcare Provision

As the name suggests, multi-professional team practice involves professionals with
different qualifications working together to provide healthcare services to patients. With team
members drawn from different fields and, therefore, possessing different types of knowledge and
skills, they are likely to offer better services to patients because the weakness of one professional
will be offset by the strength of the others. It is this relative effectiveness of multi-professional
health teams that makes them suitable for providing primary care to patients.
Primary care includes prevention of diseases, maintenance of health, and diagnosis, and
treatment of diseases (Pullon et al., 2016). Given this role, the ideal provider mix should include
physicians, nurses, nutritionists, and laboratory technicians. Working together does not mean that
these professionals will be doing each others work or helping each other perform certain tasks.
Rather, they will stick to their areas of specialty but cooperate in providing the desired care to
patients.
In this mix, the physician’s role will be diagnosis of diseases and their treatment. Nurses
will be involved in providing care for the patients, laboratory technicians in ensuring that health
conditions are promptly investigated, while nutritionists will aid in disease prevention efforts by
recommending best diet to keep one healthy (Morgan, Pullon, & McKinlay, 2015).
For the inter-professional team to effectively meet the needs of the patients, my design of
the team will divide it into two groups. These two groups will carry out their roles on different
days. The first group will include healthcare professionals primarily involved in disease
prevention and promotion of healthy lifestyle. This group will be composed of nutritionists and,
to a lesser extent, nurses. The second group will be involved in disease diagnosis, treatment, and
care. It will be composed of doctors, laboratory technicians, and nurses.

MULTI-PROFESSIONAL HEALTHCARE PROVISION 3

References

Morgan, S., Pullon, S., & McKinlay, E. (2015). Observation of interprofessional collaborative
practice in primary care teams: an integrative literature review. International journal of
nursing studies, 52(7), 1217-1230.
Pullon, S., Morgan, S., Macdonald, L., McKinlay, E., & Gray, B. (2016). Observation of
interprofessional collaboration in primary care practice: a multiple case study. Journal of
interprofessional care, 30(6), 787-794.