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One overlooked determinant of interprofessional teamwork is the mobilisation of professional identity. Taking a health or social care practitioner out of their professional silo and placing them in an interprofessional team setting will challenge their professional identity. The theory of signature pedagogy was used to investigate the challenges and what is needed to support practitioners to mobilise their professional identity to maximise teamwork.

A cross-sectional mixed methods study was undertaken in the form of three focus groups, with members of health and social care teams in Wales, UK. Using nominal group technique, participants explored and ranked the challenges and benefits of mobilising their professional identity within an interprofessional setting.

Findings on mobilising professional identity were found to be aligned closely with the three signature pedagogy apprenticeships of learning to think and to perform like others in their profession and to act with moral integrity. The biggest challenge facing practitioners was thinking like others in their profession while in an interprofessional team.

The focus of this study is health and social care teams within Wales, UK, which may limit the results to teams that have a similar representation of professionals.

Healthcare leaders should be aware of the opportunities to promote mobilisation of professional identity to maximise teamwork. For example, at induction, by introducing the different roles and shared responsibilities. Such practical implications do have consequences for policy as regards interprofessional team development and organisational commitments to adult learning and evaluation.

This is the first study of professional identity of interprofessional healthcare and social professionals using signature pedagogy to gain a better understanding of teamwork.

There is a general agreement that the potential of shared learning is great in terms of interprofessional working and client care. Despite the fact that interprofessional education has been a key area of professional education and practice policies for the last decade there is a dearth of evidence of its successful implementation in maternity care. Doctors and midwives are often educated in separate faculties within universities and rarely given the opportunity for shared learning activities, particularly at postgraduate level. Barriers to implementing interprofessional learning are identified within the literature and these include a difference in perception of the status each profession holds and different ways of working and learning which impedes the development of interprofessional relationships. It is argued that through interprofessional education, doctors and midwives should be enabled to develop skills of collaborative working, thus making referrals between professionals more effective. The exploration of the differences of professional cultures in a shared learning environment will enable professionals to formulate agreement on best practice in the clinical areas, based on current best evidence. Thus, interprofessional education aims to dispel the stereotypes and prejudice which often act as a barrier to effective collaborative working. The implications of interprofessional education on three main areas of practice are explored using a review of the literature: professional roles; conflict and collaboration between professions; and the sharing of knowledge and skills. Recommendations are made for the development of post‐registration shared learning that address these key areas.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how public relations (PR) professionals develop co-narratives with legal counsel when formulating crisis communication strategies. Understanding how PR practitioners work with their legal counterparts may help lead to more advanced and effective PR practice in the area of crisis communication and management. The authors attempt to do so in this study through interviews conducted with PR practitioners in two Asian countries – South Korea and Singapore.

In total, 11 semi-structured interviews with PR consultants, 6 in Korea and 5 in Singapore were conducted between May and August 2016. Data analyses revealed key points of interest for PR practice.

First, PR consultants in both countries reported increased collaboration with legal counsel in times of crisis. Second, PR consultants report that legal professionals have begun to realize the significance of winning in the court of public opinion. However, the process by which PR–legal collaboration takes place to develop co-narratives followed extremely different patterns in the two countries.

This exploratory study is not exempt from limitations. The findings from this study may not be applicable to other countries. As data collection in both countries relied on snowball sampling techniques, the participants in the interviews may not be representative of PR consultants in South Korea and Singapore. E-mail interviews had limitations due to their lack of richness and details compared to other forms of interviews (i.e. face-to-face or Skype interviews). However, computer-mediated interviews including e-mail interviews can still create good level of understandings about the phenomenon in question.

This study was an attempt to understand PR–legal collaboration particularly in times of crisis and contribute to the development of Asia-centric models of PR practice. There has been little research that explores how legal and PR counsels actually collaborate to devise optional crisis communication strategies for their clients (or organizations) in the times of crisis. Given that crisis communicative strategies have been shown to affect publics’ perceptions of an organization’s credibility and trustworthiness, it is important to understand how PR work with legal practitioners to develop co-narratives for optimal crisis management, and understand how their different professional perspectives, practices, and approaches affect the collaboration.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize issues related to head nurses’ decision making when managing ethical dilemmas.

The study is qualitative descriptive, in which researchers stay close to the data. The data were collected in the format of unstructured written reflections. Inductive conventional latent qualitative content analysis was applied to the data.

The issues of head nurses’ management of decision making in ethical dilemmas relate to the following aspects: taking risks in deviating from the formalities, balancing power and humaneness, maintaining the professional hierarchy, managing resistance to change, managing with limited options, and experiencing the decline of nurse’s professional and/or human dignity.

Reflections in written form were preferred to semi-structured interviews and the researchers were unable to contact the participants directly and to ask additional questions. All the reflections were produced in a language other than English.

The issues of head nurses’ management of decision making in ethical dilemmas reveal the gap between societal expectations and the opportunities to improve nursing leadership in health care organizations.

The issues of head nurses’ decision making when managing ethical dilemmas are related to contexts that reflect the attitudes of society and health care system toward nursing management.

The study adds to the understanding of issues of the management of decision making in ethical dilemmas. It is an ongoing systematic process that encourages head nurses to learn from practice and manage the quality of care by empowering themselves and nurses to take responsibility for leadership.

Interprofessional education (IPE) has been highly promoted as a means of enhancing interprofessional practice and thereby having a positive impact on healthcare systems and patient outcomes. Various documents mention that sufficient evidence has been accumulated to demonstrate the effectiveness of IPE, yet it is not completely clear what type of evidence is being alluded to. The objective of this review was to gather evidence about IPE programs that resulted in effective long-term outcomes in healthcare. Secondary outcomes included identification of the types of models that met the success criteria, barriers and facilitators of such successful programs if any.

A systematic search was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL and Scopus. The review considered studies that targeted undergraduate and postgraduate students among more than one health profession and included those in the English language published between 2010 and end of 2020.

Five studies have been identified and described in this review. These papers evaluated different IPE programs and models.

1. This systematic review investigated the evidence of the existence of IPE programs and the findings show there is no robust specific evidence of long-term impact on healthcare and on patients' outcomes. 2. The conclusion from this review is that it is still unclear what format constitutes a successful and efficient program. 3. Appropriate longitudinal studies need to be designed to identify the impact of IPE on long-term health outcomes.

Overall, the studies show that although there is an emphasis on practice-based learning, there is no robust specific evidence of long-term impact on healthcare and on patients' outcomes. Appropriate longitudinal studies need to be designed to identify the impact of IPE on long-term health outcomes.

This study seeks to examine the reconfiguration of professional groups in welfare service work through the lens of gendered inequalities in order to develop an inclusive research horizon that extends to the middle grade of care workers.

The research design positions workforce change within a wider social and cultural context by highlighting occupational, educational and unionist orders from the viewpoint of Finnish practical nurses.

A weakening anchorage in the welfare state and a differentiation of the patterns of recruitment, employment and industrial relations create segmentation, particular forms of exclusion, and identity instabilities. The article identifies the special vulnerability of the practical nurses institutionally embedded “in‐between” the upper and lower grades, the social and health sector, and the union traditions.

The national policy agenda on workforce change mainly follows the sectoral split and focuses on the established health professions. The unionist agenda of practical nurses in turn reflects interprofessional relationships and tribalism.

This analysis of welfare service work provides insight into social and cultural transformations related to workforce change in a segmented and culturally diverse labour force and offers reflections on the changing nature of craft unionism.

This article argues for the added value of historicised, gender and culture sensitive analysis of the tensions between policy aims, educational, occupational and unionist orders for understanding reconfiguration through inequality‐producing processes.

This paper aims to present a two-decade effort to improve team functioning and patient outcomes in inpatient stroke rehabilitation settings.

The principal improvement effort was conducted over a nine-year period in 50 Veterans Administration Hospitals in the USA. A comprehensive team-based model was developed and tested in a series of empirical studies. A leadership development intervention was used to improve team functioning, and a follow-up cluster-randomized trial documented patient outcome improvements associated with the leadership training.

Iterative team and leadership improvements are presented in summary form, and a set of practice-proven development observations are derived from the results. Details are also provided on the leadership training intervention that improved teamwork processes and resulted in improvements in patient outcomes that could be linked to the intervention itself.

The practice-proven development observations are connected to leadership development theory and applied in the form of suggestions to improve leadership development and teamwork in a broad array of medical treatment settings.

This paper includes suggestions for leadership improvement in medical treatment settings using interdisciplinary teams to meet the customized needs of the patient populations they serve.

The success of the team effectiveness model and the team-functioning domains provides a framework and best practice for other health care organizations seeking to improve teamwork effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to explore interprofessional collaboration during ward rounds on a Finnish emergency and infection ward from the viewpoint of three central professional groups: physicians, nurses and secretaries.

The authors utilise an ethnographically informed approach, with observations and interviews as the data collection devices. The data comprise ten interviews with staff members and ten hours of observations. The data were analysed using qualitative thematic analysis.

The ward rounds were found to be rather physician- and medicine-centred, and mostly not interprofessional. Nurses and secretaries in particular expressed dissatisfaction with many of the current ward rounds work practices. Ward rounds are an essential part of collaboration in implementing the emergency-natured operational aim of the ward, yet we found that the ward rounds are complicated by diverging professional views and expectations, variable work practices and interactional inequality.

This study makes a contribution to the research of collaboration in emergency care and ward rounds, both of which are little-studied fields. Further, context-specific studies of collaboration have been called for in order to eventually create a model of shared expertise. The findings of this study can be utilised in studying and developing emergency care contexts.

This paper sets out to explore health professionals' views and experiences regarding the work culture that exists in their hospital units, and further how patients influence these experiences.

The paper employs a qualitative approach involving individual interviews with 60 health professionals in Canada employed in what is conceptualised as “open” (emergency room and maternity care) and “closed” (intensive care, head and neck surgery) units.

The paper finds that the influence of the hospital unit outweighs the influence of professional boundaries but for some groups more than for others. Health professionals in more open units tend to be less satisfied with their work, have more difficult relations with patients, and experience tensions with co‐workers and management. Those in closed units tend to be more satisfied with their work, have relatively better relations with patients and co‐workers, and tend to have more cooperative relations with management. The different structural conditions of work in open and closed units are also clearly important.

The sample for the study was self‐selected from one hospital, which may limit the generalisability of some of the findings.

The insights garnered from the study may help professionals and managers to develop unit‐specific policies to create a more positive workplace culture.

There is a growing body of research on professional culture and oganisational culture that often does not clearly delineate how the two exist concurrently. The paper explicitly investigates this issue by examining work culture across various health professional groups and also across hospital units, and further how patients figure in these experiences.

This paper aims to extend the consideration of distributed leadership in health-care settings. Leadership is typically studied from the classical notion of the place of single leaders and continues to examine distributed leadership within small teams or horizontally. The purpose is to develop a practical understanding of how distributed leadership may occur vertically, between different layers of the health-care leadership hierarchy, examining its influence on health-care outcomes across two hospitals.

Using semi-structured interviews, data were collected from 107 hospital employees (including executive leadership, clinical management and clinicians) from two hospitals in Australia and the USA. Using thematic content analysis, an iterative process was adopted characterized by alternating between social identity and distributed leadership literature and empirical themes to answer the question of how the practice of distributed leadership influences performance outcomes in hospitals?

The perceived social identities of leadership groups shaped communication and performance both positively and negatively. In one hospital a moderating structure emerged as a leadership dyad, where leadership was distributed vertically between hospital hierarchal layers, observed to overcome communication limitations. Findings suggest dyad creation is an effective mechanism to overcome hospital hierarchy-based communication issues and ameliorate health-care outcomes.

The study demonstrates how current leadership development practices that focus on leadership relational and social competencies can benefit from a structural approach to include leadership dyads that can foster these same competencies. This approach could help develop future hospital leaders and in doing so, improve hospital outcomes.