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

Abstract

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 in care integration will contribute to our understanding of the gap between theory and implementation of care integration by focusing on the ‘work’ that teams do to create new knowledge.