Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present a Swedish study exploring health care professionals' cooperation in the chain of care for expectant and new parents between antenatal care (AC), postpartum care (PC) and child health care (CHC). Furthermore, the rationale was to conceptualise barriers and facilitators of cooperation in order to generate a comprehensive theoretical model which may explain variations in the care providers' experiences. Thirty-two midwives and CHC nurses were interviewed in five focus group - and two individual interviews in a suburb of a large Swedish city. Grounded Theory was applied as the research methodology. ONE CORE CATEGORY WAS DISCERNED: linkage in the chain of care, including six categories with subcategories. Despite the fact that midwives as well as CHC nurses have common visions about linkage, cooperation is not achieved because of interacting barriers that have different influences on the three links in the chain. Barriers to linkage are lack of professional gain, link perspective and first or middle position in the chain, while facilitators are chain perspective, professional gain and last position in the chain. As the last link, CHC nurses promote a linkage most strongly and have the greatest gain from such linking.

Highlights

  • Discharge from hospital wards for mothers with newborn babies has become typical in many Western countries, which means that cooperation between maternity and child health care professionals is essential to ensure safe quality care; cooperation between key professional groups is suboptimal [1]

  • In this study, using Grounded Theory Methods (GTM) means generating hypotheses to arrive at a deeper understanding of cooperative processes among child health care (CHC) nurses and midwives working in the chain of care of antenatal care (AC), postpartum care (PC), and CHC

  • Professional care in AC, PC and CHC may be described as a chain in which each facility constitutes a link; they may function as separate links or be linked to form the AC-PC-CHC chain of care

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Summary

Introduction

Discharge from hospital wards for mothers with newborn babies has become typical in many Western countries, which means that cooperation between maternity and child health care professionals is essential to ensure safe quality care; cooperation between key professional groups is suboptimal [1]. The purpose of this article is to present a Swedish study exploring health care professionals’. Concepts like chain of care, coordination, cooperation and ­collaboration have several different meanings in the literature [2]. Chain of care is defined as linked coordinated activities including all health care providers serving a specific patient group within a county with the aim of providing good. Our particular interest is in cooperation between individual professionals or groups of professionals in different facilities but in the same chain of care, (AC-PCCHC). It is notable that nurses with a specialist degree (midwives or paediatric nurses or district nurses) have far reaching responsibilities and are in charge of most of the care in the chain of care

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