Interprofessional meetings, organization, and interactive practices: the reflexive achievement of patient-centeredness

Interprofessional meetings are crucial for achieving patient-centeredness in healthcare. Exactly how patient-centeredness is reached during these meetings remains underexamined. Adopting an Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (hereafter EMCA) perspective, this contribution looks at video-recordings of interprofessional meetings in two distinct healthcare settings: rehabilitation and internal medicine. It aims to provide new insight into how investigations of patient-centeredness as a reflexive achievement allow us to better understand the organizational and relational efforts required to achieve it in practice. This contribution outlines how different healthcare contexts result in variety in the meeting frequency, duration, aims, participants, and agendas, which in turn means that the opportunities for patient-centeredness are not the same. But it also illustrates how patient-centeredness depends on the ways the various opportunities are seized and play out in the interprofessional interactions. It is therefore argued here that research on how patient-centeredness is reached in interprofessional meetings and the development of recommendations for enhancing it both require consideration of context-specific conditions and how participants adapt to and simultaneously modify them to achieve patient-centeredness in practice.