Interdisciplinary Collaborative Practice of Pediatric Music Therapists on Multidisciplinary Teams: Results from a National Survey

Interprofessional collaborative practice between multidisciplinary team members is difficult to achieve for many reasons, including scheduling demands, high workloads, physically distant workspaces, and lack of opportunity for face-to-face interactions between team members. Overlapping practice capabilities, differences in treatment paradigms, perceived power differentials, and misunderstanding about team members' roles may potentially lead to role ambiguity and role conflict between team members. However, music therapy service development literature demonstrates that pediatric music therapists display collaborative behavior in their efforts to establish new music therapy services and the role of the music therapist on the multidisciplinary team. Pediatric music therapists often demonstrate role flexibility influenced by the holistic needs of the pediatric patient and family. Their practice may encompass psychosocial, medical, and rehabilitative goals.

The aims of this project are to examine the organizational, contextual, and relational factors surrounding the interprofessional collaborative practice of pediatric music therapists, and to describe the processes by which interprofessional collaboration is facilitated, hindered, enacted, and sustained.

Design or methodology:
This is the first phase of an explanatory sequential mixed methods study. The second phase will be a multiple case study. To understand the current landscape of interprofessional collaboration on multidisciplinary teams in pediatric hospitals, pediatric music therapists were surveyed about their workplace characteristics, their interactions with co-workers, and their perceptions of interprofessional collaboration, servant leadership, interpersonal team processes, and thriving at work. Results from the free-text responses included information regarding the pediatric music therapists’ most frequent collaborators, how pediatric music therapists educate others about their role, how they interact with other music providers in the hospital, and what factors were believed to contribute or inhibit collaborative interactions with co-workers. Results from the standardized instruments were analyzed to explore whether servant leadership, interpersonal team processes, and thriving at work were predictors of interprofessional collaboration.

Results (Data, outcomes and evidence):
This research is in progress. Survey results will be collected and analyzed in the summer of 2021.
Conclusion:
The findings are expected to have implications for collaborative behavior undertaken by health care professionals in new roles on multidisciplinary teams. These implications will be discussed.