“It’s all about presence”: Health professionals’ experience of interprofessional collaboration when mobilizing patients with hip fractures

Mobilisation is an interprofessional task in the evidence-based care pathway, Enhanced Recovery After Surgery and multiple health care professionals collaborate when mobilising patients with hip fractures. Drawing on the theory of relational coordination, and hereby focusing on relationships and communication, this study sets out to explore how health professionals experience and describe interprofessional collaboration when mobilising patients with hip fractures treated according to Enhanced Recovery After Surgery. Two rounds of interviews were conducted with 26 informants from 11 different professional groups. Data were analysed through thematic analysis. The main findings show that functional goals characterise the collaboration on mobilisation due to undefined roles and responsibilities and that specialised knowledge lead to a need for physical presence and formalisation in the collaboration. We argue that the hospital as a workplace can be characterised through logics of production and logics of belonging. These logics create care work managed by quality and efficacy and scales of fairness that install power relations necessary to recognise when engaging with interprofessional collaboration. We argue that the hospital can be characterised as both a production site and a home and is thereby managed by both quality assurance and scales of fairness and justice that install power relations necessary to recognise when engaging in interprofessional collaboration. We conclude that a sole focus on relationships and communication cannot solve the challenges of interprofessional collaboration, as it risks taking focus from the context in which the health professionals work.