Team meetings in rehabilitative eldercare

An underpinning or undermining of professional dialog?

Abstract

Over the past decades cross-disciplinary teamwork has been introduced and celebrated as means to improve knowledge sharing, quality and efficiency in public service provision. In effect, social- and healthcare organizations increasingly use team meetings to introduce and underpin new modernization and professionalization strategies and visions. The implications of the renewed focus on team meetings on service work and on workers’ professional dialogue have so far primarily been discussed in a theoretical, but abstract way through critical societal diagnoses or in a more concrete, but less process-sensitive way through quantitative data analyses. The contribution of this paper is, in contrast, to provide a situated and dynamic account of what actually is discussed and what actually goes on at team meetings. The paper draws on an ethnographic-inspired case-study of home care organizations, where team meetings, where care workers with different status and occupations participate, have recently been introduced along with a new re-ablement vision. The paper shows how norms and group dynamics evolve during these meetings, as well as how these norms and dynamics frame the professional ‘dialogue’. These ‘dialogues’, however, are asymmetrical. The meetings are guided by a supervisor who enjoys a privileged position. During the process some workers experiences 112 Abstracts are sanctioned while others are rewarded, which reduces or even undermines creative dialogues about how the complex work tasks of re-ablement can be professionally optimized and dealt with. Prospectively, the findings suggest that a true and creative professional dialogue during team meetings requires new and more all-encompassing and including management practices.