Interprofessional collaboration in health promotion: changing tasks as leverage for innovation

Abstract

Abstract Background Increasing demand for interprofessional collaboration calls for change in organisational practice and interactions of professionals. Health promotion is a particularly interesting area for observing these changes, because it involves professionals with different disciplinary backgrounds usually also working in different sectors. In Denmark new health promotion strategies in organisations were introduced to engage professionals in new tasks and establish interprofessional ways of working. Our research aimed to explore how these strategies impact in professional practices, using a cookery project for children as a case study, which involved care assistants and school teachers. Methods A qualitative case study was conducted to investigate how care assistants from a nursing home and school teachers implemented a cookery project in a Danish school; the focus was on joint care and teaching situations among the two professions and their users. Our data consisted of documents, participatory observations, and interviews with professionals; a sociological institutional framework was applied to analyse the data. Results Institutional changes and the demand for joint care and teaching activities in the cooking project fostered new interprofessional collaboration. Three themes of new professional activities emerged: 1) ‘interplay’ related to making different generations collaborate on the tasks involved in the cookery session, 2) ‘care’ concerned with caregiving activities, and 3) ‘learning” focused on schooling on healthy food and cooking. The activities were related to traditional and new roles in professional practices of both groups. Conclusions Changes in professional practices evolved in an informal manner from new tasks and ‘lived’ experiences in the cookery project. The specific practical tasks of health promotion offer an important leverage for future interprofessional collaborations.