The Interprofessional Team as an Emergent Structure of Participation : A Case Study on Primary Care Visits of Unaccompanied Foreign Minors

Adopting a constitutive model of communication, we illustrate how an interprofessional team can be conceived of as an on-stage, interactionally accomplished outcome of identifiable communicative practices rather than a pre-defined, normative model of participation. We identify an interaction pattern we call interprofessional attunement. Applying interaction analysis to observed primary care visits of unaccompanied foreign minors, we document how professionals from different hierarchically organized caregiving specialties manage the typical dilemma of triadic visits involving communicatively impaired patients: maximizing information comprehension versus fostering patient agency. Interprofessionality is accomplished through observable communicative resources mobilized in the unfolding visit that allow practitioners to collectively overcome this dilemma. Our approach offers practice-oriented findings emergent from, and sensitive to, the constraints and possibilities of actual, in vivo interprofessional collaboration.