Questioning as a practice of constructing expertise and communication competence in interprofessional teamwork

This study explores how questioning functions as a communicative practice in managing everyday problems and negotiating expertise and communication competence in an interprofessional healthcare team. High-quality collaboration in such teams is essential, but hierarchies and time pressures may hinder joint development of competence. Drawing on Grounded Practical Theory and employing Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis, we analyze audio-recorded team meetings and focus group data from a Finnish orthopedic team serving as a positive deviance case. Findings shows that questioning addresses problems related to patient needs, inefficient structures, and voicing expertise in a top-down organization. Three questioning strategies were identified: asking for and answering to the patient, making expertise visible through questions, and questioning the organization. Situated ideals included prioritizing patients, encouraging organizational critique, and allowing the display of inexpertise. Questioning functioned as a key practice for linking organizational levels, constructing collective expertise, and for metacommunicative negotiation of shared communication competence in interprofessional teamwork.