The Difficult Case Consultation: An intervention for interprofessional health communication
Accepted: 3 January 2022
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Authors
An interprofessional group of healthcare practitioners sought a new approach to the early detection, prevention, and resolution of “difficult cases” in the inpatient care context. An action research project addressed this need by developing a narrative re-framing tool that helped reveal entrenched assumptions regarding the root causes of difficult cases in the hospital. The intervention method that emerged from the project — the Difficult Case Consultation (DCC) — is a theoretically-grounded process that helps teams to analyze and address complex communication problems in interprofessional healthcare contexts. Collaborative processes grounded in theory have proven to be the most successful when seeking to optimize healthcare team communication. The article describes the collaborative development of the DCC, presents two cases illustrating the process, and describes systemic factors that exacerbated the emergence of difficult cases in the inpatient context.
How to Cite
PAGEPress has chosen to apply the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all manuscripts to be published.