The Refereess are Biased, Further Solidifying Entrenched Professional Boundaries: An Expository Dilemma of Interprofessional Work in Healthcare

Abstract

The practice of teamworking in primary care among interdisciplinary medical-paramedical health professionals presents with varying depths of problematic dilemmas. For a typical tertiary teaching hospital in Ghana with a decentralized healthcare system, the professional dilemma is one which is juxtaposed between the refereeing public media advocacy as to ‘who is who’ and ‘influence’ in government at policy level and who the ‘marginalized’ professional groups apparently turns to. This dilemma is further expatiated through very strong legitimate professional turf protective boundaries from all parties involved in primary care; doctors, pharmacists, nurses and other paramedics. The multifaceted healthcare delivery system in Ghana is one that amply demonstrates this and empirical ethnographic evidence depicts a call for the media, legal and quasi-legal forums to be referees in adjudicating ‘who is who’ or can be key player(s) in healthcare teams. Consequentially, this paper depicts that, the referees (public: media, legal and quasi-legal forums) though external to the healthcare team membership, apparently unwittingly are making and have made one health professionals’ grouping win this debate through an all too common perceptible reality. Furthermore, those health groupings expressing a sense of being marginalized interestingly seeks, and turns to these referees.