This chapter will revisit the themes, concepts and theories considered in Chapter One; synthesise and summarise the common, as well as unique, themes emerging from Chapters Two to Nineteen to explore the possible reasons behind any tensions and, in line with the aims of Part Six (see Figure 1.1), consider a possible way forward. Through an exploration of the authors’ ‘lived experiences’, this book provides a series of lenses focusing on what is happening in the real world as professionals negotiate and wrestle with tensions and conflicts in their day-to-day practice. Chapter One referred to the authors’ interest in interprofessional working and consideration of ethics in that context. It set out their conceptual understanding of the terms ‘ethics’, ‘personal ethics’, ‘professional ethics’ and ‘interprofessional ethics’ and briefly considered some of the main ethical theories. These themes and theories will now be summarised to understand reasons for disjuncture and to provide suggestions that will inform future research and practice with the aim of reducing any disjuncture.

Dynamic identities in an interprofessional context

As noted in Chapter One, increasingly, there is recognition that interprofessional working is promising in terms of leading to more effective provision for service users, while it is acknowledged that there are a number of factors that negatively impact on effective implementation of this practice. Some of these arise from the multiple identities and terminologies used.

Professional identity can be very important, and most professional qualifying programmes explicitly set out to foster this. However, it seems that in trying to create a professional identity for themselves, professionals inevitably end up ‘othering’ other professionals. Othering, a concept first systematically theorised by Spivak (1985, cited in Jensen, 2009), has been described as a symbolic cultural code to create a split between ‘them’ and ‘us’, with ‘us’ usually being perceived to have positive and ‘them’ to have negative qualities (Krumer-Nevo, 2002). Rees and colleagues (Chapter Nineteen) provide the narrative of ‘Mike’, a nursing student who identified with other nursing staff and saw them as ‘heroes’, and othered the consultant and saw him as the ‘villain’. Similar nuances can be picked up from MacEachern's (2011; Chapter Twelve) police officer, who used ‘we’ for the police officers and ‘they’ for social workers despite both working in the area of child protection.