The struggle for interprofessional work

Abstract

T he article presents an analysis of interprofessional work within Danish health care context inspired by Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis. Four diverging discourses are identified; a learning discourse, a discourse of professional democratization, a discourse with focus on organizational optimizing and a radically border-transgressing discourse. Despite the fact that common features like e.g. patient involvement can be identified across all four discourses, they profoundly differ in their approaches to how work across professional and organiza - tional differences should be improved. An important finding concerns the discourse’s different stand towards the issue of power relations. Only a single discourse advocates alterations of power relations in clinical practice, while the other discourses aim for improvement of work relations within the existing hierarchical structures. The article points towards the need to further discuss the trajectories that the different discourses establish for collaboration with in health care practice. The argument put forward is that we need to consider carefully what kind of future health care system we aim for and which role we would like health care professionals to play, when engaging in one or more of the existing discourses.