Background 

Home visiting programmes aiming to support parents and promote more equal health amongst youngchildren have grown in Sweden and in other countries. These programmes involve interprofessional teams. Teamworkin interprofessional contexts often requires setting boundaries, but professionals’ boundary work in the home settingis unexplored. Therefore, this article focuses on interprofessional teams comprising child healthcare nurses, midwives,social workers, and dental hygienists in a home visiting programme for first-time parents in Sweden; it aims to explorehow the professionals performed boundary work that enabled collaboration and to investigate important contextualconditions for this kind of boundary work.

Methods

The data were drawn from semi-structured interviews with twelve professionals from the four differentdisciplines. Content analysis was used to explore their boundary work.

Results

The findings show that the professionals performed three forms of collaborative boundary work. They maintained boundaries by clarifying their distinct roles and expertise. However, the differences were viewed ascomplementary, and the professionals worked together humbly to complement each other’s knowledge andperspectives. Lastly, they tended to drop perceptions of prestige and blurred the boundaries to accommodate theiroverlapping knowledge. Important conditions for the success of collaborative boundary work were meetings prior tothe home visits, the opportunities for discussion and reflection after the home visits, and the informal character of thehome setting. Consequently, the professionals were able to jointly contribute to a holistic view of the visited families,which increased the possibilities to meet these families’ needs.

Conclusions 

This study contributes knowledge on boundary work in interprofessional collaborations in thehome setting. The informal character of the home setting seemed to facilitate collaboration and contributed tocreating informal professional roles. The findings suggest that having interprofessional teams in the home settingenabled collaboration as well as reinforced support for first-time parents, which emphasizes the merit of home visitprogrammes