Abstract
BACKGROUND:
In certain service activities, the intangibility of what is being produced hinders the vision of an expected result or product. In multi-professional teams, this difficulty becomes increasingly greater, as participants’ perceptions are conditioned to their respective fields of knowledge and different professional experiences. This is a common situation in healthcare services.
OBJECTIVE:
To describe and explain the work coordination process applied by multi-professional teams in order to deal with the intangibility inherent in the healthcare services.
METHODS:
This study involved six multi-professional teams from the public primary healthcare service in Brazil. Interviews and observations of team meetings were carried out, with focus on the critical elements of a coordination process: work plans and routines, roles and responsibilities, knowledge sharing, and a common reference history.
RESULTS:
There is coexistence of two distinct coordination processes being performed in the same work activity: operational coordination, associated with activities that somehow follow standard procedures; and diagnostic coordination, associated with diagnosis construction, alternatives analysis and decision making.
CONCLUSIONS:
The consequences of intangibility can be overcome by mechanisms that enable a common perspective among the participants involved in the productive process, and by the team members’ familiarity with each other.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.