When Bothering is Part of Professional Practice: Interprofessional Collaboration and Institutional Influences in Primary Care

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Western healthcare systems, increasing numbers of nurse practitioners are practicing in primary care organizations, and their integration onto interprofessional teams can be somewhat bumpy. In this article, we rely on the institutional theory of organizational communication to investigate the situated communication challenges faced by NPs as they integrate onto primary health care teams (RQ1), and how these local challenges manifested institutional features (RQ2). We analyze interview data from NPs, their physician partners, clinical nurses, and a network administrator for NPs at five family medicine clinics in Quebec, Canada. We found three main challenges to IP communication between NPs and physicians, namely a lack of time, the professional necessity of bothering, and talking to – and like – a doctor. We present the solutions that participants found to overcome or workaround these challenges. We also interpreted the institutional features that inflected – or “moored” – the situated communication practices and challenges reported by our participants to better understand how the local experience of IP communication is shaped by broader institutional forces.