Health professions in transition? Workplace artefacts as a window into interprofessional dynamics in chronic disease prevention
Associate Professor Inge Kryger Pedersen has published the paper 'Health professions in transition? Workplace artefacts as a window into interprofessional dynamics in chronic disease prevention' in the journal Dansk Sociologi.
Since 2008, all Danish public hospitals should implement a screening programme among inpatients to evaluate their habits of nutrition, smoking, alcohol intake, and physical activity, thereby deciding how to prevent or avoid worsening chronic conditions. However, who is supposed to do this work? Drawing on short-term ethnographic material, Pedersen investigates how a new professional task area can be invented by developing different forms of so-called workplace artefacts, defined as boundary objects. In order to illustrate workplace relations, the analysis of such artefacts demonstrates how task boundaries are managed by health professionals.
Preventive work at hospitals emerges as a possible arena for nurses in particular. Pedersen argues that how and which particular workplace artefacts are developed can demonstrate important professional coordination work at stake. The final section of perspectives concentrates on how preventive work tasks may open in future health scenarios for more and maybe new professions, or professional groups or segments or health workers to lay hold on certain degrees of control.
Read the article in the journal Dansk Sociologi 33(3), 2022, s. 31-57.