Tokenistic or Authentic: What exactly do you mean by "Let's collaborate"?

Patients as educators: Interprofessional learning for patient-centered care.  Towle A & Godolphin W. Med Teach. 2013; 35:219-225. Available online from the Baystate Health Sciences Library, or from PubMed at your institution. 

I write this post from the coffee station at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) annual meeting. The coffee is being refilled after spending so many days fueling the conversations of leaders, followers, educators, contributors, and stakeholders in American medical education. No doubt this coffee fuels the exchange of many introductions and handshakes, business cards, and emphatic opportunistic collaborations. 

Against that backdrop is the perspective outlined by Towle & Godolphin in this article. Their phrase "tokenistic..." keeps coming to mind. As in, "Professionals have difficulty letting go of their expert role, leading to tokenistic involvement rather than partnership which requires a reduction in the power difference between [insert your profession here] and [their profession here]." 

Consider the dynamics that underscore this sentence: Power! Collaboration! Expertise! Control! Interprofessional partnerships! If these weren't the makings of an article in Medical Teacher, they would certainly be so for a Lifetime Original Movie for clinician educators. 

Interprofessional education and practice is the obvious alignment of these constructs: do we know enough about the roles of our colleagues in order to relinquish power in decision-making appropriately and in order to make collaborative decisions that depend on the expertise of multiple people? 

The not-so-obvious and more common application of these constructs might be in the everyday collaborations; the educational programs (as described in this article) and the manuscript-writing partnerships. And, perhaps in the committee formation and the policy revisions. When do we truly expect and ask for authentic collaboration, and when are we comfortable with tokenistic involvement? For ourselves and for our colleagues? Do we always know which is being given? 

Interprofessional collaboration is the authentic application of involvement from many professions to the care of the patient. But how are we trained to do this in our other professional roles, and how do we encourage and expect it of our colleagues? 

Bottom Line:

Read this article to prompt a discussion of meaningful collaboration, but apply the concept to other professional areas. Perhaps some reflection here might set a higher bar for communication with our patients, our learners, our colleagues, and ourselves.