Reconfigured professional purpose in times of crisis: Experiences of frontline healthcare professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How is professional purpose impacted in the context of a crisis? Building on discussions about professional purpose and identity, the paper explores how the understanding that professionals have about the framing, scope of functioning and aims of their profession is impacted during a time of crisis. The paper draws on interviews with 41 kinesiologists working at an accidents & emergencies (A&E) hospital in Chile during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper shows professional purpose as a fluid, situated notion that gets re-shaped in light of contextual features. In the face of new and changing demands during times of crisis, professionals reconfigure their professional purpose to take advantage of the opportunities available. This reconfiguration takes place in response to the external context of the profession (its positioning in the public domain) and the internal relational context of the profession (its positioning with other professionals). The paper suggests a research agenda to develop a processual, situated approach to the interrogation of professional purpose to embed contextual features in scholarship in this area.

New Ways of Working in UK mental health services: developing distributed responsibility in community mental health teams?

BACKGROUND: This paper examines the introduction and operation of a number of support roles in mental health services. This is done in the context of concerns about the effectiveness of CMHTs. AIMS: Three questions are addressed: the degree to which concern for the work of consultant psychiatrists informed the introduction of the new roles; what the reforms implied for the work of the psychiatrist and those in new roles; and the impact of any changes on the operation of CMHTs. METHOD: Data were collected as part of a national-level evaluation. The main means of collection was the semi-structured interview. RESULTS: The study shows: that reform was underpinned by concerns about the workload of psychiatrists; and that while in principle the responsibilities of the psychiatrist were to be distributed across other team members, those in new roles felt themselves to be isolated. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the intentions of policy, the creation of the new roles did little to extend the idea of distributed responsibility in CMHTs.