Each year 1 in 20 in-patients at hospitals will be given a wrong medication, 3.5 million will get an infection from someone who didn’t wash his or her hands or take other appropriate precautions, and 195,000 will die because of mistakes made while they’re in the hospital. (Maxfield et al, 2005)

The healthcare system is a complex machine; a dynamic system with myriad working parts, all of them intertwined and connected. Collaboration is simultaneously the grease that keeps the healthcare machine running and the brakes that keep it from crashing.

The IOM published a groundbreaking report, To Err Is Human, in 2000 that attributed as many as 98,000 deaths each year to medical errors (IOM, 2000). This results in enormous costs across the healthcare industry, from the $29 billion a year in financial damages, to the loss of collective patient trust that comes with a broken Hippocratic Oath. As patients’ health needs increase in complexity, coordination of services between and across disciplines takes greater precedence than ever before. In a healthcare system described as fragmented and decentralized (IOM, 2000), patient outcomes depend on nurses to establish collaborative partnerships with other members of the healthcare team (ANA, 2010a).

More than 2.6 million registered nurses are employed in the United States (ANA, 2011). Registered nurses provide direct patient care, education, and coordination of services, and communicate with many healthcare professionals on a daily basis, making nurses key players in the collaboration wheel. The ANA, in its current edition of Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice (2010a), delineates the characteristics shared among collaborative nurses:

Collaboration is the process by which professionals relate to one another. Therefore, effective teamwork requires collaborative effort (O’Daniel & Rosenstein, 2008), with professionals working cooperatively, sharing responsibility, and making decisions jointly (Nair et al., 2012). Collaboration ebbs and flows; it’s a give-andtake between healthcare professionals. It can occur between two individuals, within small groups, and within or across disciplines (Ellingson, 2002).

Effective collaboration in health care is associated with numerous positive outcomes. Many measurable outcomes relate to improved patient care, for example, decreased length of stay, improved patient satisfaction, improved pain control, improved functioning in activities of daily living, and decreased mortality. Arguably just as important, working in a collaborative environment improves the nurse’s perception of patient care, and is associated with decreased turnover and improved morale (Kenaszchuk et al., 2010; Maxfield et al., 2005; Nair et al., 2012; Siu et al., 2008;). All of these outcomes translate, directly and indirectly, to a higher bottom line for individual healthcare organizations and the healthcare industry as a whole.