Background. Today health and social care delivery are largely team based but the question remains whether the voice of the user is perceived as a team member or merely as the recipient of the care. There have however been few efforts to understand or change the smallest interprofessional frontline units who generate the actual service, i.e. the microsystems.

Purpose. This paper presents preliminary findings regarding descriptions of constructions of user participation in a multiparty negotiation context.

Materials and methods. The material consisted of ethnographic field notes and audiotapes from observations (n=8) of interprofessional team meetings in one clinical healthcare microsystem. The teams included the user and health professionals, e.g. medical social worker, physician and psychologist. The users who participated in the observed team meetings had all long-term mainly physical conditions.

Findings and discussion. Preliminary inductive analyses of observations of interprofessional team situations involving users indicates identity constructions in multiparty talk where the user is beheld primarily as a loyal and active member of the team. Discussions will relate to how user participation is learned and constructed by users and health professionals in collaborative care at the microsystem level.