Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare

Strengthening Multidisciplinary Healthcare Teams: Workforce Integration, Team Collaboration, and Equitable Care

Multidisciplinary healthcare increasingly depends on teams composed of professionals with different cultural, linguistic, educational, and lived-experience backgrounds. These differences shape how teams communicate, make decisions, collaborate, and partner with patients and families. This Article Collection explores how healthcare organizations and teams can strengthen workforce integration and team collaboration to support safer, higher-quality, and more equitable care across primary, acute, community, and long-term care settings.

This topic is important because workforce shortages, migration, and cross-border recruitment are reshaping health systems worldwide. Many services increasingly rely on internationally educated health professionals, multilingual teams, and new forms of task-sharing. Without adequate preparation and support, teams may face communication breakdowns, role ambiguity, inequitable opportunities, and reduced psychological safety, affecting staff wellbeing and patient outcomes. Source countries may also experience workforce depletion, service gaps, disrupted team functioning, and loss of training investments. Better evidence is needed on how organizations can support ethical recruitment, effective workforce integration, language access, mutual learning, and sustainable workforce partnerships.

We invite submissions on strengthening multidisciplinary healthcare teams, with a particular interest in:

1. Workforce integration and ethical recruitment, including the integration of internationally educated health professionals and impacts on source-country systems and teams;
2. Language access, language discordance, and communication practices; and
3. How cultural competence, cultural humility, inclusive leadership, and diversity management influence team collaboration, staff experience, patient safety, and equitable care.

Cross-cutting topics include organizational readiness, implementation strategies, policy, and measurement. We welcome original research, mixed-methods studies, implementation and quality improvement studies, policy analyses, and systematic, scoping, or realist reviews.

Submission Instructions:

During submission (in step 2 "About paper"), you will see a question asking "Are you interested in submitting to an article collection?" Please select the radio dial for "Yes". Then select "Strengthening Multidisciplinary Healthcare Teams: Workforce Integration, Team Collaboration, and Equitable Care" from the drop down menu.

Authors submitting to this Collection are welcome to enter the promo code 5A501 for a 10% discount off our Article Publishing Charge. (The promo code field appears in step 3 "Billing address".)

All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo full peer-review; Guest Advisors will not be handling submitted articles. Please review the journal’s aims and scope and author submission instructions prior to submission.

Please contact Krista Thom ([email protected]) with questions about this Article Collection.

Guest Advisor:

Helena Kristina Halbwachs is a researcher, educator, and consultant in health and social care, specializing in ethics, equitable healthcare systems, workforce challenges, and long-term care. Her doctoral dissertation explored cultural competence in the Slovenian healthcare system and proposed a model for its development, and she has published articles on cultural competence in healthcare systems and related organizational and policy challenges. She currently works across borders, engaging with health and social care issues in an international context. In addition, she serves as President of the Ethics Committee of Chamber of Nurses and Midwives Association of Slovenia.

Disclosure Statement: Assistant Prof. Dr. Halbwachs declares no conflicts of interest.