Unfolding Practices: A Sociomaterial View of Interprofessional Collaboration in Health Care

Abstract: Knowledge sharing is an essential part of interprofessional practice and will be even more important in the future in regard to the opportunities and chal-lenges in practices for delivering safe and effective healthcare. The aim of this ethnographic study was to explore how professional knowledge can be shared in an interprofessional team at a spinal cord injury rehabilitation unit. A sociomaterial per-spective on practice was used to analyse the data, and by theorizing upon this, we captured different aspects of interprofessional collaboration in health care. The find-ings illuminate how knowledge emerges and is shared between professionals, and how it passes along as chain of actions between professionals, in various ways. The findings offer a novel perspective on how interprofessional collaboration as a prac-tice, involving ongoing learning, unfolds. This reveals the mechanisms by which different forms of expertise are mobilized between professions as health care work