Herzing BH700 Unit 3 Mid-Week Reflection: Applying Interprofessional Collaborative Practice Guide + Example

The Unit 3 Mid-Week Reflection asks you to imagine working in an integrated health care setting and address five things in one 250-300 word post: barriers to effective interprofessional collaboration, the roles and scope of practice of at least three professionals with a role-clarity strategy, how you would bring this topic to your primary care team, and how you would explain interprofessional collaboration to a patient. This packs more into the word count than the Unit 3 Initial Discussion, so planning matters more here. For the rest of the course structure, see the Herzing BH700 Course Guide.

Herzing BH700 Unit 3 Mid-Week Reflection: Applying Interprofessional Collaborative Practice

Instructions:

Imagine that you are working in an integrated health care setting. For this post, you will provide responses to the following prompts: Assess/Evaluate barriers to effective interprofessional collaboration (e.g., hierarchy, communication, training differences); Analyze the roles, responsibilities, and scope of practice of at least three professionals within an integrated care team. Identify areas of overlap and potential conflict, and propose strategies to enhance role clarity.  For added context, include the answers to these prompts in your response.

• How would you bring this topic to your primary care team? Which professions would you engage first, and what role would you assume?
• Envision yourself explaining interprofessional collaboration to a patient or community member. How would you translate it into accessible language, and what questions would you ask to learn their view? Provide supporting evidence for your response.

Please be sure to validate your opinions and ideas with citations and references in APA format.

What the Discussion Is Asking You to Do

1. Assess barriers. Evaluate barriers to effective interprofessional collaboration, such as hierarchy, communication, and training differences.

2. Analyze roles. Examine the roles, responsibilities, and scope of practice of at least three professionals on an integrated care team. Identify where their roles overlap or could conflict, and propose a strategy to improve role clarity.

3. Apply it to your own team. How would you bring this topic to your primary care team? Which professions would you engage first, and what role would you take on?

4. Translate it for a patient. How would you explain interprofessional collaboration to a patient or community member in accessible language, and what would you ask to learn their perspective?

5. Support all of it with evidence. At least two peer-reviewed sources, APA 7, with DOIs or links.

Five prompts in 300 words means none of them gets a full paragraph on its own. The strongest posts connect all five to one continuous scenario rather than answering each in isolation.

A Planning Strategy for This Post

Because this prompt has more moving parts than a typical BH700 discussion, plan before you draft:

These are planning ranges, not requirements. The point is to stop any single prompt from eating the whole post.

Choosing Your Three Professionals

Pick three roles that actually interact around the same workflow rather than three unrelated professions. If you already established a setting and gap in earlier BH700 work, the professionals directly involved in that gap are the strongest choice, since you can describe real overlap rather than inventing one. A primary care provider, a behavioral health care manager, and a consulting psychiatrist working around the same referral process will produce a more specific overlap-and-conflict discussion than three professionals who rarely interact.

Barriers: Go Beyond the List in the Prompt

The prompt names hierarchy, communication, and training differences as examples. Naming all three without evidence is a summary, not an assessment. Choose the barrier most relevant to your scenario and support it with a source that studied that specific barrier in a comparable setting, rather than citing a source once and letting the rest of the paragraph run on your own assumptions.

Explaining Collaboration to a Patient

This prompt is testing whether you can translate a systems concept into language a patient would actually understand, not whether you can define interprofessional collaboration accurately. Avoid restating the WHO definition in plainer words. Instead, describe what the patient would actually experience: who might check in with them, and why. Pair this with a genuine question you would ask the patient, not a rhetorical one you already know the answer to.

Fictional Discussion Example

Fictional Example for Illustration Only. Do Not Submit as Your Own Work.

This example continues the fictional scenario used across Gradevia’s BH700 content: Riverside Community Health Center, its behavioral health referral gap from the BH700 Unit 1 Identify Topic and Setting Guide, and the Collaborative Care Model proposed in the BH700 Unit 2 Proposal Guide. All details are fictional and used only to demonstrate how the five prompts can be answered as one connected scenario rather than five separate answers.

Implementing the Collaborative Care Model at Riverside Community Health Center will only succeed if role clarity and communication barriers, not just staffing, are addressed directly among the team.

Rawlinson et al. (2021) found the most consistent barriers to interprofessional collaboration in primary care are lack of time and training, unclear roles, fears about professional identity, and poor communication, not simply the absence of a behavioral health role. At Riverside, this suggests adding a care manager will not fix the referral gap unless the surrounding team understands how that role fits.

Applying the IPEC (2023) roles and responsibilities competency, three professionals anchor this model: the primary care provider, who identifies and discusses the positive screen with the patient; the behavioral health care manager, who tracks referrals and provides brief interventions; and the consulting psychiatrist, who reviews caseload data and advises on treatment adjustments without seeing patients directly. Overlap exists between the provider and care manager over who initiates the behavioral health conversation, a likely conflict without a defined handoff script and shared documentation protocol clarifying who owns each step.

I would bring this topic to the primary care team by first engaging the medical director and one physician champion, since provider buy-in determines whether patients are actually referred into the new workflow. My role would be convener, facilitating early workflow discussions rather than dictating the model.

Explaining this to a patient, I would avoid clinical terms: you will have a team member checking in with you after today’s visit to help make sure any next steps actually happen. I would ask what has made past referrals hard to follow through on. A concrete practice implication: Riverside should pilot a one-page role script before full rollout, since Rawlinson et al. (2021) identify unclear roles as a primary, addressable barrier.

References

Interprofessional Education Collaborative. (2023). IPEC core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice: Version 3. https://www.ipecollaborative.org/ipec-core-competencies

Rawlinson, C., Carron, T., Cohidon, C., Arditi, C., Hong, Q. N., Pluye, P., Peytremann-Bridevaux, I., & Gilles, I. (2021). An overview of reviews on interprofessional collaboration in primary care: Barriers and facilitators. International Journal of Integrated Care, 21(2), 32. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijic.5589

Common Problems in This Discussion

• Answering all five prompts as separate mini-essays instead of one connected scenario.
• Naming three professionals with no real overlap or interaction.
• Listing barriers from the prompt without evidence tied to your own scenario.
• Explaining collaboration to a patient using the same clinical language from the video or readings.
• Proposing a role-clarity strategy too vague to actually implement.
• Running past 300 words by giving equal space to all five prompts.

30-Second Final Check

• 250-300 words.
• Barriers to collaboration assessed with evidence, not just listed.
• At least three professionals’ roles, scope, and overlap analyzed.
• A specific role-clarity strategy proposed.
• A realistic answer for bringing the topic to your own team.
• Patient-facing explanation uses accessible, non-clinical language.
• At least two peer-reviewed scholarly sources used.
• Limitation, counterargument, or alternative interpretation included.
• One concrete research, practice, or policy implication included.
• APA 7 citations and references included, with DOI or link.

Need a Second Look Before You Post?

Five prompts in 300 words leaves no room for wasted sentences. Gradevia can review whether your barriers, role analysis, team strategy, and patient explanation are tightly connected before you submit.

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