Inter-Disciplinary Work in the Context of Integrated Care – a Theoretical and Methodological Framework

Inter-disciplinary team working is an essential mechanism for the delivery of integrated care. This paper summarises a narrative review of the research on the ‘work’ that teams do to develop inter-disciplinary practices, addressing the question ‘How do interdisciplinary teams ‘become’ in the context of models of integrated care?’.

The narrative review identities a gap in our understanding of the active boundary work that different disciplines working together to deliver care integration engage in when creating new interdisciplinary knowledge, creating an inter-disciplinary team identity and negotiating new social and power relations. This gap is particularly significant in relation to the role played by patients and care-givers.

This paper presents a way of examining inter-disciplinary working as a process of creating knowledge, identity and power relations both in terms of a theoretical lens, circuits of power, and a methodology, institutional ethnography.

An explicit focus on understanding power relations within inclusive inter-disciplinary teams ...