Members' sensemaking in a multi-professional team

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Sociology of Health
• Communication Studies

Background:

• Multi-professional teams are crucial in modern healthcare settings, particularly in specialized units like Child and Youth Psychiatry.
• New Public Management reforms influence organizational structures and professional interactions within these teams.
• Effective sensemaking and communication are vital for successful collaboration and patient care.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the process of sensemaking as an interactive phenomenon among team members in a multi-professional setting.
• To explore how team members construct their identities and positions through discourse in a Swedish Child and Youth Psychiatric Unit.
• To understand the influence of communication on cooperation within healthcare teams.

Main Methods:

• A discursive pragmatic approach, grounded in ethnomethodology, was employed.
• Dialogism was used to analyze the multi-voiced complexity of discourse and talk-in-interaction during treatment conferences (TC).
• Interviews with team leaders and members were conducted before and after the observed TC.

Main Results:

• Team members actively create and negotiate their identities and group positions through interpreting and "misinterpreting" interactions.
• Advocating for specific treatment methods leads to an intertwining of the team member's identity with the method itself.
• The study highlights how discourse shapes professional roles and relationships within the team.

Conclusions:

• Verbal abilities and communication strategies are key to enhancing cooperation in multi-professional healthcare teams.
• Findings offer practical insights for healthcare professionals and managers to improve teamwork and collaboration.
• The study contributes to research on cooperation challenges in multi-professional teams and institutional discourse analysis.