Enhancing Collaborative Practices Across Nursing, Laboratory Medicine, Pharmacy, and Midwifery: A Theoretical Framework for Holistic Patient Care ksa

Abstract

Mutual respect, understanding, and effective communication among nurses, laboratory medicine professionals, pharmacists, and midwives are essential components of holistic patient care. Insufficient capability to work collaboratively can lead to a variety of negative outcomes, such as misinterpretation of results, medication errors, and suboptimal care. Intercultural interaction in healthcare is increasingly crucial in today's multicultural and multi-ethnic society. Health professional students, including nursing, medical laboratory science, pharmacy, and midwifery students, face difficulties in grasping the essence of intercultural interaction. Most programs oversee a variable number of curricular hours that health professional students can interact, including laboratory sessions. Students in these professions face the same limitation while obtaining their first professional degree, regardless of cultural and social beliefs and practices among patients, which impact accuracy, interpretation, and efficient use of data such as blood transfusion, body weight in cooking recipes, height in easily obtained aspirin dosage, antibiotics in upper respiratory infections, contraceptive medication, saturated fat, and cholesterol in hypertensive patients, and self-medication in patients. There is a limited number of scholarly publications on intercultural interaction across nursing, medical laboratory science, pharmacy, and midwifery. With increased interaction, these opportunities become central to the socialization process and the eventual integration of students into their respective disciplines. This study provides an innovative special curriculum for a joint collaborative learning perspective of cultural and professional interaction in healthcare developed by social brainstorming.