Beyond Interprofessional Epistemic Borders: The Agency of Informing in Nurse-Physician Interaction

Interprofessional management of knowledge in health care settings appears to be particular-ly vital for the way in which information circulates, medical decisions are taken, and nurs-ing practices are implemented. This article investigates how the nurses impact on the ongo-ing diagnostic reasoning of a medical teamwork of an Intensive Care Unit by one of the typical activities of their repertoire: informing. Adopting a Conversational Analysis-informed approach to a dataset of video-recorded morning briefings, we analyze in details the nurses’ conversational practices of informing, in terms of turn-taking, turn design and sequential position. Our findings illustrate how the nurses exert their agency without cross-ing the institutionally sanctioned epistemic and deontic borders to which physicians and nurses are observably oriented to. In so doing, they cautiously challenge the nurse-physician epistemic imbalance. Implications, limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.