To Explore the Effects of Multidisciplinary Collaborative Nursing on Clinical Outcomes in Patients Undergoing Skull Defect Repair

AIM: To explore the effects of the multidisciplinary collaborative nursing model on neurological function, cognitive function, depressive symptoms, and quality of life in patients with cranioplasty (i.e., surgical repair of skull defects).METHODS: This is a single-center retrospective study. A total of 101 patients who underwent skull defect repair at The First People’s Hospital of Jiashan from June 2022 to November 2025 were selected as the study population. Patients were divided into two groups based on sequential temporal cohorts: those treated before the implementation of the multidisciplinary collaborative nursing protocol (June 2022 to October 2023) were designated as the control group (n = 54), whereas those treated after its hospital-wide implementation (November 2023 to November 2025) served as the observation group (n = 47). The control group received routine nursing, while the observation group received multidisciplinary collaborative nursing, including multidisciplinary team formation, preoperative psychological counseling and rehabilitation guidance, postoperative rehabilitation training, dynamic assessment of psychological status, and continuous nursing guidance after discharge. Neurological function, cognitive function, anxiety/depression, and self-care ability were assessed using the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS), Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), and Activities of Daily Living (ADL), respectively. Quality of life was measured with the General Quality of Life Inventory-74 (GQOLI-74), and postoperative complications were documented.RESULTS: Before the intervention, no significant differences were observed between the two groups in any of the measured indices (p > 0.05). After the intervention, both groups demonstrated improvement in neurological and cognitive function, as well as reductions in anxiety and depression scores; however, the observation group showed significantly greater improvements compared with the control group. The observation group showed significantly lower NIHSS scores than the control group (p = 0.02), along with significantly higher MMSE scores (p < 0.01). Both HADS-A (p < 0.01) and HADS-D scores (p < 0.05) were significantly reduced in the observation group compared with the control group. The ADL score of the observation group was also significantly higher than that of the control group (p = 0.01). Regarding quality of life, the observation group demonstrated significantly higher scores in the psychological (p < 0.01), social (p = 0.03), and physical dimensions (p < 0.01), while no significant difference was found in the material dimension (p = 0.30). Furthermore, the overall complication rate was significantly lower in the observation group (p = 0.04).CONCLUSIONS: Multidisciplinary collaborative nursing markedly improves neurological and cognitive function in patients undergoing skull defect repair, effectively alleviates anxiety and depression, enhances daily living self-care ability and quality of life, and reduces the incidence of postoperative complications.