Peer support services have been established in several professions to help individuals cope with challenging work and life situations. Using the medical profession as an example, we have qualitatively studied physicians’ experiences of peer support. We conducted interviews with 12 physicians shortly after they had attended peer support and 12 months later. We analysed the interviews using systematic text condensation. We then reanalysed each pair of interviews (baseline and follow-up) using Schein’s model to further deepen the analytical insights. The results show that the professional medical role can evolve. Peer support helped the individual physician to become aware of, acknowledge and adjust to how unwritten rules within the medical culture had formed a non-sustainable professional role. Peer support can facilitate changes at and outside work, as well as foster a willingness to seek treatment for self-care.

Professionalism is a crucial element of curricula in many profession-oriented higher education programmes. However, defining and working with professionalism-oriented learning objectives can be challenging. Comparative perspectives on professionalism across educational contexts are often missing. This study explores educators’ ideas on what students need to learn to effectively navigate and manage their professional practice within three professional education programmes: police, medical, and social work. The analysis captures how professionalism is portrayed in documents and interviews with teachers. The findings highlight shared ideas of professionalism across educational boundaries. The concept is described as multi-dimensional and complex, necessitating more communication about what can be expected of students and how teaching and assessment should be designed.

This article illustrates how clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are integrated into clinical reasoning and affect decision-making processes in emergency medical services (EMS). CDSS aims to assist clinical reasoning with relevant patient information and medical knowledge, facilitating decision-making. As CDSS become increasingly significant in Swedish healthcare, understanding their implementation is critical, particularly as technological innovations may reshape clinical reasoning and professionals’ decision-making. The study draws on empirical data from observations and interviews with registered nurses (RNs) in a simulation project. Findings illustrate how clinical reasoning is a collective process among colleagues and how emotions and tacit knowledge are central to professional judgment. Although RNs express confidence in technical systems assisting clinical reasoning, they remain skeptical in situations requiring compromises to their judgment based on CDSS outputs. Finally, the article problematizes the effects on RNs when working with unsynchronized or insufficiently functioning technical systems.

In hospitals, several professions collaborate on patients’ medication treatment. We explore clinical pharmacists’ work and ask what opportunities and challenges arise when clinical pharmacists participate in interprofessional medication reviews. Findings from observations and interviews in two hospitals reveal that medications were discussed in greater depth in pre-rounds where clinical pharmacists were present as they negotiated medication treatment, leading to collaboration with physicians and boosting nurses’ engagement. Clinical pharmacists’ brokering activities created knowledge-sharing opportunities and aligned perspectives across professional boundaries. However, clinical pharmacists also experienced challenges being heard by physicians, highlighting professional conflicts regarding jurisdictional claims to medication decisions. This challenge was accentuated by a lack of adaptation for clinical pharmacists’ occupational role on a structural level. We argue for consistent adaptation for clinical pharmacists’ occupational roles to support their professional jurisdiction and utilise comprehensive work practices in medication treatment.

The study examines a new professional function, the rehabilitation coordinator, in Sweden’s healthcare system. The rehabilitation coordinator acts as an inter-organizational facilitator in the return-to-work process. Using a Foucauldian perspective, the rehabilitation coordinator as a subject could be considered both as an objectified function shaped by governmental regulation and as a process by which the individual chooses how to perform the role. The rehabilitation coordinator must navigate between legislative regulations and adhere to their own professional ethics, resulting in varying forms of subjectivity. Metaphors used by rehabilitation coordinators provide insights into how individuals perceive their ethical responsibilities and how they approach interactions with patients and healthcare professionals. The paper underscores the ambiguity of the role and sheds light on how diverse considerations inherent in professional roles but also within the subject molds professional subjectivity in the Swedish healthcare system.

Over the last decades, western mental healthcare has increasingly been governed by market and bureaucratic principles. As a consequence, therapists are faced with conflicting demands and decreased autonomy. This study examines how they cope and whether their strategies suffice. Drawing on the direct experience of therapists through interviews, we demonstrate that psychologists have become quite skilled at balancing and navigating bureaucratic and market demands that were at odds with professionalism. However, when they were structurally faced with bureaucratic and market demands that were already irreconcilable with each other, these skills fell short. Trying to meet all requirements took up so much of their resources that sometimes, professional reasoning and agency disappeared altogether. In some cases, this led to detachment, burnout, and patient neglect. Our findings suggest that the public interest in having a well-functioning mental healthcare system requires more room for professional autonomy.

This article discusses the relationship between the demands on nurses’ professional performance and adherence to the use of medicines and supplements for their management. This approach allows us to analyze the transformations of nursing work and how nurses use various natural and pharmaceutical resources to cope with the pressures they face in their professional activities. To understand the interconnection between the transformations in nursing work and what we refer to here as the process of pharmaceuticalisation of work contexts, we use the results of a sociological mixed methods study on the use of medicines and food supplements for managing professional performance. The results show some of the main pressure factors in nursing work and how the increase in professional pressure substantially affects performance-related medicine use, as these become more frequent when nurses perceive their work as more intense, demanding, and exposed to risks.

This study examined student teachers’ study profiles and achievement levels from selection through to the bachelor’s phase of their teacher education programmes. The latent profile analysis revealed two student teacher study profile subgroups associated with varying study achievement levels from the first three years of the teacher education programme. In a more detailed examination, the results revealed that the main differences occur during the bachelor’s phase of the teacher education programme, wherein student teachers are learning to understand the research-based teaching profession and how to conceptualise theories and more independently learn to write their bachelor’s theses. A gender comparison between subgroups revealed that male student teachers were more likely to be allocated to the less research-oriented subgroup and female students to the highly research-oriented subgroup. These findings are discussed with regard to how teacher education programmes could better support different learners.

Increased focus on the practical components of Danish health care education and greater coherence between theory and practice have been persistently identified as major issues requiring quality improvement. Policy initiatives to standardize education in eight health professional bachelor’s programs, including greater theory-practice coherence, prompted us to explore the types of educational practices highlighted by clinical supervisors to strengthen coherence between theory and practice. Thirty-one qualitative interviews were conducted with clinical supervisors in nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, nutrition and health programs, biomedical laboratory science, midwifery, radiography, and psychomotor therapy. Data were thematically analyzed in a sociology of knowledge framework. We found that theoretical knowledge had a higher status in the programs. The imbalance may have negative consequences, whereby theoria activities in the practical part of the programs may, in unintended and subtle ways, increase in dominance. The intrinsic qualities of clinical practice are, therefore, at risk of being downplayed.