Mind the Gap: Building Bridges in Interprofessional Teams
On Friday 10 June 2022 Elisabeth Andvik will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
«Managing Adult Patients with Chronic Diseases: Theoretical Insights and Implications for Practice»
Trial lecture:
10:15, Aud M, NHH
Title of the thesis:
«Mind the Gap: Building Bridges in lnterprofessional Teams»
Summary:
Interprofessional collaboration is gaining traction as an increasingly promoted mechanism to respond to the pressures and demands of exceedingly complex and ill-structured problems in society. This is based on the premise that bridging diverse complementary expertise through interdepend teamwork may improve quality of care and improve issues of international scarcity in clinicians, maldistribution of health resources, and patient safety concerns. Indeed, these unprecedented times of pandemic have impacted macro, meso, and microstructures globally, nationally, and locally, emphasizing the centrality of collaboration.
However, despite radical shifts in society, interprofessionality has not effectively translated into practice. Structural and social forces in interprofessional teamwork challenge well-established professional demarcations. This blurs roles and threaten professional identities, causing tension and jurisdictional conflicts. Current literature offers limited understanding of the interactional dynamics on how emergent interprofessional practice unfolds, providing inadequate guidance for practice on how build bridges between professionals. This dissertation explores how interprofessional collaboration unfolds, emphasizing core mechanisms that sustain collaboration over time. An ethnographic study was conducted at a regional Norwegian hospital, where eight interprofessional teams comprising a unique combination of professionals were tasked to solve complex chronic conditions in children.
The dissertation offers novel insight contributing to the field of interprofessional collaboration, through three empirical papers. The first article explores how initial interactions matter for interprofessional collaboration. It positions the study within the broader team interaction, team development and complex problem-solving literature. Findings comprise development of a typology of initial interaction patterns, elaborating on how initial interaction patterns that allow for high cognitive and relational qualities sustain collaboration in consecutive team processes and lead to successful complex problem-solving.
The second article explores how professionals free themselves from the straitjacket of their professional identity. It explores the phenomenon of professional identity reconstruction through the theoretical lenses of identity work and identity play. Findings illuminate development of the identity plasticity model, which portrays progressive phases of professional identity reconstruction - from a fixed uniprofessional identity to dynamic multiprofessional identity. Mechanisms of courage, vulnerability and flexibility is shown to advance identity reconstruction. Thus, underscore the interactional quality beyond individualistic accounts in professionals’ identity reconstruction.
The third article explores how the process of transforming disciplinary knowing in practice unfolds in interprofessional teams. Findings identify various boundary strategies that professional employ in the process of knowledge transformation. It also illuminates the interplay between boundary strategies over time that influence the knowledge transformation in interprofessional teams. A dynamic model of knowledge transformation is developed, and two core boundary crossing activities are identified as crucial in boosting knowledge transformation.
The dissertation contributes with novel contribution to practice, especially for professionals who struggle daily with how to best treat and organize collaborative work that deals with complex conditions. It emphasizes crucial implications for broader contextual issues, providing guidance on how policy initiatives and interventions effectively may build bridges between professionals in interprofessional teamwork. The dissertation argues that the question is not whether we incorporate or utilize interprofessional teams in the future, but rather how we can transform the healthcare system to sustain collaboration.
Defense:
12:15, Aud M, NHH
Members of the evaluation committee:
Professor Christine B. Meyer (leader of the committee), Department of Strategy and Management, NHH
Professor Jeanne Mengis, Università della Svizzera italiana
Scientist Joanne Goldman, University of Toronto
Supervisors:
Professor Vidar Schei (main supervisor), Department of Strategy and Management, NHH
Associate Professor Therese E. Sverdrup, Department of Strategy and Management, NHH
Professor Bjørn Erik Mørk, Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, BI
The trial lecture and thesis defense will be open to the public.