Collaborative Practice Between Registered Nurses and Medical Practitioners in Australian General Practice: Moving From Rhetoric to Reality

Collaborative practice between medical practitioners and nurses is purported to improve patient access to services, improve health outcomes, provide a more ‘seamless service’, increase efficiency of care, reduce health care costs and improve practitioner job satisfaction. Therefore, it is important to understand what hinders and what facilitates this type of interdisciplinary functioning. This paper will examine these factors in the context of the Australian general practice setting. It is timely because recent Government financial incentives have been provided to increase the number of nurses employed in this sector and also to expand their role. Awareness of these factors may enable nurses in general practice, both individually and collectively, to better understand the dynamics of role expansion in order to move towards collaborative partnerships with their medical colleagues. Recommendations to advance collaborative practice are given and a model of practice proposed that identifies possible autonomous, collaborative and dependent functions for nurses in general practice.