Nurses’ Lived Experience With Nurse–Physician Collaboration

Background. Quality patient care requires collaboration among health professionals. In 2016, 250,000 U.S. citizens died from preventable medical errors. One individual does not cause such errors. Researchers cite a lack of nurse–physician collaboration (NPC) as a contributing factor. Method. Streubert’s phenomeno-logical design guided this study. A rigorous analysis of eight nurse interviews was conducted and reached data saturation. Results. A developed formalized “ex-haustive description” of nurses’ lived experiences with NPC was validated by all nurse participants. One new finding was that nurses had difficulty initiating NPC for their patients early in their career and this remained an issue at times. Conclusion. This is the first U.S. qualitative study in which nurses described their positive and negative experiences with NPC and their desire to improve NPC for enhanced patient outcomes. Implications for nurse educator specialists, hospital adminis-trators, and researchers were derived.