Positive collaboration between nurses and physicians is essential in all areas of care especially in emergency practice. This is because it has a significant relationship with the quality, safety, accountability, and responsibility of care. Three areas are positively related to collaborative interaction between nurses and physicians: provider outcomes, patient outcomes, and organizational outcomes.

To examine nurses' and physicians' attitudes towards nurse-physician collaboration in the Emergency Department of Dr Saiful Anwar General Hospital, Malang, Indonesia.

The study was a comparative descriptive quantitative study using a modified Jefferson Scale of Attitude towards Physician-Nurse Collaboration. Data were collected from 47 nurses and 24 physicians who participated in the study. Descriptive statistics, parametric and non-parametric inferential statistics were used to determine group scores and to examine differences between groups, as well as to determine the relationship between demographic characteristics and participants attitudes.

Emergency nurses had significantly more positive attitudes toward collaboration than emergency physicians (p < 0.001). Emergency nurses had significantly higher scores in three of four underlying factors of the instrument: “physician dominance”, “nurse autonomy”, and “caring as opposed to curing”. The effects of gender, age, education, and experience in other hospitals on nurses' and physicians' attitude towards collaboration were not statistically significant. However, experience in the Emergency Department of Dr Saiful Anwar General Hospital was significantly related to participants' attitudes towards collaboration (p = 0.023).

The findings of this study indicate that both organizational and individual strategies should be developed to enhance the nurse-physician collaborative relationship. Inter-professional education may enhance health care professionals' attitudes towards collaboration. A larger and more representative sample is needed for future research, especially examining relationships such as between collaboration of these health professionals and patient outcomes and work place satisfaction.