Attitudes of nurses and physicians towards nurse-physician collaboration in northwest Ethiopia: a hospital based cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND Collaboration between professionals is important in health institutions where most activities are team-performed. Ineffective nurse-physician collaboration affects patient outcome, nurses' job satisfaction and organizational cost and is challenged by personal, interpersonal and organizational factors. The main objective of this study was to assess attitudes of nurses and physicians towards nurse-physician collaboration and the level of satisfaction with regard to quality of collaboration between them at Referral Hospitals of Northwest Ethiopia, from February 1st to April 30, 2013. METHODS An institution based cross-sectional study was conducted among 176 nurses and 53 physicians working in Felegehiwot and Gondar University Referral Hospitals. Data were collected using self-administered questionnaires. Attitudes of nurses and physicians were measured using Jefferson scale of attitudes towards nurse-physician Collaboration. Results were summarized using descriptive statistics and difference of means and proportions were evaluated using student t test p <0.05 was considered as significant. RESULT The overall response rate was 90.50%. Nurses demonstrate more favorable attitudes than physicians with mean score of 49.63 and 47.49 and standard error of mean 0.474 and 0.931 respectively with p = 0.043. For the Jefferson Scale Attitudes towards Nurse-Physician Collaboration includes four subscales, which are: 1) shared education and teamwork, 2) Caring vs curing, 3) nurses autonomy and 4) physician dominance. Nurses scored higher on three subscales (1, 2 and 4). However, statistically significant differences were noted with regard to subscales 2 and 4 (p = 0.01, p = 0.004, respectively). CONCLUSION This study identified that neither nurses nor physicians were satisfied with their current collaboration and nurses demonstrated less satisfaction with the current nurse physician collaboration. As compared with physicians nurses had more favorable attitudes towards collaboration specifically toward nurses' contributions to the psychosocial and educational aspects of patient care, and stronger rejection of a totally dominant physician role.