Power, (com)passion and trust in interprofessional healthcare

This chapter examines the affective bases of traditional, hierarchical models and interprofessional models of healthcare. Overall, we explicate the emotional elements of healthcare work, and how emotions sustain or undermine different models of care. Accordingly, we define emotions as physiological, structural and cultural, experienced individually and collectively, consciously and unconsciously (thus, we use emotion and affect interchangeably) and capable of ‘do[ing] things’ at a structural level (Ahmed 2004, p. 119; Barbalet 2006). We draw on theories from Collins (1990), Foucault (1972) and Holmes (2010) to conceptualise how hierarchies and emotions intersect. And we conceptualise interprofessional practice as illustrative of broader trends in late modernity.