ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a series of activities designed to assess the nature of collaboration between healthcare providers and seeks to enhance the quality of interprofessional collaboration within a critical care setting. It presents the activities (interviews with clinical staff and observations of collaboration), which have been designed to gain a deeper understanding of interprofessional dynamics and identifies related issues that can contribute to patient harm. The chapter aims to improve interprofessional collaboration and communication to help increase quality and safety of patient care and outlines some ideas for evaluation of these activities. Within a critical care context, the purpose of observation is to identify how healthcare professionals interact in practice, both within and between professional groups. The selection of an interviewer is important as their identity can affect what kind of information healthcare professionals are willing to share. There are two basic types of interviewer to consider: the insider and the outsider.
