Teams, tests and inter-professional relations – transformation of work in psychiatry

Abstract

I nter-professional and interdisciplinary teamwork is a practice of several professions, creating new knowledge through either complementing or intersecting between different understandings, skills and approaches. The field of interest is work in psychiatry in Denmark, which like the rest of the health sector has become marked by modernization and rationalization that imply a still greater demand for transparency, controllability and evidence-based knowledge. In the process professional identities and meanings are challenged and negoti - ated. The article probes into how the rising application of psychiatric tests - that may be seen as a mediation of attempts at modernization - contributes to challenging and transforming ideals of knowledge, and thereby also the whole foundation for inter-professional teamwork. Focus is on the ambivalences and conflicts which are often aspects of these forms of cooperation in teamwork. The article points at, how the still more pivotal position that psychiatric test assume in the diagnostic work may lead to interdisciplinary team work characterized by division of work and increasingly hierarchized relations between different professional groups.