Geriatric Rehabilitation Care and Interprofessional Collaboration

Frailty and multimorbidity are common among patients in geriatric rehabilitation care (GRC). Proper care of these patients involves multiple professionals, which requires optimal interprofessional collaboration to provide the best care possible. Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) goes beyond multiprofessional collaboration. It requires professionals to think beyond the expertise of their own discipline and to work on joint outcomes in which the patient is actively involved. This study describes the development of the GRC teams of an elderly care organization towards IPC.

Mixed method pre-post study of 15 months. The interprofessional training program comprised: team trainings, webinars, and online team sessions. Data was collected by administering the EPIS (interprofessional identity) and QuickScan (QS) (aspects of collaboration) measurements to GRC staff and by observations of the multiprofessional team consultation (MPC) meetings of six GRC teams of an organization for elderly care in the Netherlands. ADL independence (Barthel Index) and number of inpatient days were analyzed before and after the project.