title: Interprofessional collaboration-in-practice: the contested place of ethics.
abstract: The main question examined is: How do nurses and other healthcare professionals ensure ethical interprofessional collaboration-in-practice as an everyday practice actuality? Ethical interprofessional collaboration becomes especially relevant and necessary when interprofessional practice decisions are contested. To illustrate, two healthcare scenarios are analyzed through three ethics lenses. Biomedical ethics, relational ethics, and virtue ethics provide different ways of knowing how to be ethical and to act ethically as healthcare professionals. Biomedical ethics focuses on situated, reflective, and nonabsolute principled justification, all things considered; relational ethics on intersubjective, professional, and institutional relations; and virtue ethics on prephilosophical tradition and what it means to be good and to be human embedded in social and political community. Analysis suggests that interprofessional collaboration-in-practice may be more rhetoric than actuality. Key challenges of interprofessional collaboration-in-practice and specific conditions perpetuating dissension and conflict are outlined with specific education and policy recommendations included.
authors: Faculty of Nursing, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. N.W., Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada. ewashen@ucalgary.ca
authors: Carol
authors: C
authors: Ewashen
authors: Gloria
authors: G
authors: McInnis-Perry
authors: Norma
authors: N
authors: Murphy
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000941:ethics*; D003152:Community Health Nursing / Q000193:education; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D004993:Ethics, Nursing; D006801:Humans; D007373:Interinstitutional Relations; D007400:Interprofessional Relations / Q000941:ethics*; D015404:Nursing Methodology Research; D016134:Organizational Policy; D018802:Patient-Centered Care / Q000379:methods; D010687:Philosophy, Nursing
keywords: Biomedical ethics; ethics; interprofessional collaboration; interprofessional practice; relational ethics; virtue ethics