Homologies between Sets of Healthcare Professionals' Collaborative Working Practices in Hospitals

Over the past few decades, health policymakers around the globe have highlighted the decisive role of interprofessional collaboration in improving healthcare systems and outcomes. This is said to have resulted in changes in public hospital healthcare practice and in an increasing demand from hospital management for adaptive and collaborative capacity that highlights the need to rethink the way these institutions are organised and led. However, managerial striving towards a reorientation of professional workflows may challenge legitimate work practices with their highly specialised actors in these physical spaces. In this chapter, we discuss the homologies of social space by considering potential affinities between three differently positioned hospitals in Denmark. We do this by focusing on position-takings towards professional collaboration, drawing on interviews with chief physicians and chief nurses. Our findings demonstrate that the new, collaborative norm for care delivery both reproduces and is dissident in regard to existing hierarchies dependent on the relative prestige of the involved hospitals, their specialties, and the interpersonal relationships between the involved healthcare professionals. In some cases, these relationships transform the effect of objective relationships.