Professional Role Identity: At the Heart of Medical Collaboration Across Organisational Boundaries

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to help answer two persistent calls in the literature: the first asks to strengthen the understanding of medical collaboration across levels of healthcare delivery; the second one requests paying more attention to the individual experience of different forms of professional work. Accordingly, the study was guided by the following research question: How do family physicians and specialists working at different levels of healthcare delivery enact their professional identity when interacting in their situated clinical contexts?

Methodology: This was a multiple interpretive case study in which, based on Giddens’ ideas, professional identity was viewed as a dynamic structural element of social life recursively related to professionals’ collaborative actions through sensemaking processes. The study involved 57 participants. Face-to-face individual semi-structured interviews and organizational documents were the main sources of data. Deductive-inductive thematic analysis was adopted as strategy for data analysis.

Findings: Three prevailing physicians’ identity roles were elicited: medical expert, care coordinator, and team member. These professional identities, not mutually exclusive, were instantiated in three specific modalities of collaboration: quasi-inexistent, restrained, and extended. The entanglement of a particular identity role and a specific collaborative practice became meaningful through a complex net of organizational and institutional features, and patients’ nosological profiles.