The challenge for members of interprofessional teams is to manage the team processes that occur in all teamwork while simultaneously managing their individual professional identities. The aim of this study was to identify and describe difficulties perceived by health professionals in interprofessional teamwork. Utterances on verbal actions and resolutions were also explored to enable a discussion of the implications for interprofessional learning. Individual interviews using a Critical Incident Technique were performed with 18 Swedish professionals working in healthcare teams, and examined with qualitative content analysis. The main findings show difficulties related to the team dynamic that arose when team members acted towards one another as representatives of their professions, difficulties that occurred when the members’ various knowledge contributions interacted in the team, and difficulties related to the influence of the surrounding organization. The perceived consequences of the difficulties, beyond individual consequences, were restrictions on the use of collaborative resources to arrive at a holistic view of the patient’s problem, and barriers to providing patient care and service in the desired manner. This paper also discusses how experiences of managing difficulties entailed various forms of interprofessional learning situations.

Background. In recent decades there has been an increasing demand in Western countries to change care organisations and to coordinate resources and professional competencies to better meet the needs of the patient/service user. Since society promotes this kind of work, it may be valuable to explore the self-presentations of a multi-professional health care team.

Aim. The aim of this paper is to report a study conducted to explore how members of multi-professional health care teams talk about their team. Specifically, the team members' talk was analysed to explore the discursive patterns that emerged and their functions.

Methods. A discourse analysis was carried out on existing empirical data from focus group interviews with a member-identified category sample comprising 32 health care professionals in six authentic multi-professional teams in south-east Sweden. The analysis focused on the participants’ discursive constructions of multi-professional teamwork, on the way they talked about their group, and, in particular, on their use of the pronouns we, they and I.

Findings. The constructions of we by multi-professional health care teams showed discursive patterns that are here referred to as knowledge synergy and trusting support, which included factors such as cross-learning and personal chemistry. The pronoun we was also used as a flexible resource to manage expertise, power and leadership within the teams, and it might also function to ease the pressure for consensus.

Conclusions. The mentioned discursive patterns provide powerful rhetorical resources for the team members, both to affirm their choice of membership and to claim superiority in relations with the surrounding community (“the others”) by linking to a societal discourse that promotes collaboration.