NURS FPX 4005 Assessment 2

NURS FPX 4005 Assessment 2 Interview and Interdisciplinary Issue Identification Student name School of Nursing and Health Sciences, Capella University NURS-FPX4005: Nursing Leadership: Focusing on People, Processes, and Organizations Professor Name Submission Date   Interview and Interdisciplinary Issue Identification The multidisciplinary teamwork has become an essential aspect of modern healthcare because complex patients are likely to require expertise and abilities of multiple disciplines working together in the direction of a shared configuration (Warren and Warren, 2023). As a nurse who is ready at the baccalaureate level, the ability to determine the problems that the organization is struggling with, arrange the solutions as a team, and make sure the evidence-based strategies are implemented is the most significant in improving the patient and the system outcomes. Such an assessment is the initial step in the process when an interview with a healthcare professional is carried out to explore real-life issues related to communication, workflow, or coordination that are present in an organization. Interview Summary The interviewed nursing leader worked in a 200-bed community hospital providing acute medical-surgical care, obstetrics, and outpatient specialty clinics to a city and suburban community of patients. The heterogeneous population of adults and older adults with a wide range of chronic and acute illnesses characterizes the organization; the recent tendencies in the services are the high turnover rates in the inpatient area and the growth of the pressure on the outpatient follow-up. On the list of operational stressors presented by the participant in the interview, insufficient discharge coordination between nurses, case management, and outpatient services stood out, which causes delays in the patient flow and even readmission (Cadel et al., 2022). Such system pressures were put in the environment of a system where staffing variability and conflicting priorities make communication and transition of care on time challenging. The interviewee is a nurse manager in two inpatient units of the medical-surgical unit who identified daily activities that include the responsibilities of nursing staff supervisors, interaction with case managers and physicians, length of stay outcomes, and readmission rates. Referring to organization-related issues, the interviewee said that the lack of interdisciplinary communication (discharge plans, a lack of information about outpatient appointments) became an obstacle to the working process, increased nursing workload, which negatively affected patient satisfaction and their treatment continuation. Some of the fixes that had already been made by leadership included short interdisciplinary huddles, ad hoc electronic reminders, and specific staff education, but were temporary fixes due to poor engagement and not standardized processes (Girnius et al., 2024). On the issue of culture, the interviewee indicated that there was an overall positive disposition towards teamwork, but there was a lack of consistency in various departments working on engaging in formal interdisciplinary processes; past experiences of interdisciplinary teams revealed that the key to success was centered on the use of formal communication tools in addition to leadership support. The interview was facilitated using open-ended questions, reflective probing, and active listening because a broad scope of information can be collected to be explored further. Issue Identification The key issue discussed in the interview is that discharge coordination has never worked, and there was a lack of communication among the nursing staff, the case managers, the physicians, and the outpatient service provider. It is a problem in interdisciplinary nature too because effective discharge planning requires coordination of different departments, joint decision making, as well as sharing of information on time to facilitate the effective transition of patients. The interdisciplinary approach is thus unusual since no department has all the information or authority to maximize discharge, and the experience of individual departments, such as individual nurse-led education or case management alerts, did not result in permanent improvement (Tseng et al., 2025). The remarks of the interviewee about the slowness of communication, incoherent workflow, and inconsistency in discharge participation help to understand that the problem is interdisciplinary, and teamwork and collaboration are the only ways out. Change Theories That Could Lead to an Interdisciplinary Solution A potent model to facilitate an interdisciplinary intervention and create a discharge coordination improvement is the Change Theory by Lewin and the 8-step change model of Kotter. The Lewin model has emphasized three phases, which include unfreezing, changing, and refreezing, that are very natural in supporting the team-based practice change by making the stakeholders realize the importance of the change, adopt new collaborative behavior, and standardize the communication process among the disciplines. Kotter’s model provides extensive attention to steps, such as creating a sense of urgency, a guiding coalition, shared vision, and empowering action on a large scale, which were also found in collective leadership, which is the coordinated effort that is required in interdisciplinary teams. Both theories endorse the systematic communication, shared ownership, and progressive assimilation of new workflow, which are crucial in correcting the communication failures as seen in the interview. The peer-reviewed sources present the same evidence that these models can be successfully applied in a medical setting, especially in situations when the change that was to be implemented comprises the coordination of work of the members of different professional groups (Persson et al., 2022). The theories can be applied to the discharge coordination issue, especially because they provide systematic methods of offering resistance, ensuring staff participation, and integration of new communication practices among the different departments. The unfreezing phase presented by Lewin can help the organization to understand that the existence of disjointed communication is leading to poor patient outcomes, and the change phase can be proposed to implement systemic interdisciplinary discharge huddles or standardised communication tools. Kotter’s steps also enable the leaders to create interdisciplinary champions and entrench new behaviors by identifying and training individuals and creating feedback loops (Zomorodi et al., 2024). The cultural, behavioral, and organizational determinants of such problems are directly mentioned in the two theories due to the inconsistent participation and non-standardized processes that the interviewee mentioned, which hindered the effective discharge planning. In addition, the specified sources are current, evidence-based, and featured in credible peer-reviewed healthcare journals, and, therefore, the theoretical backgrounds applied to address the