Working together. An interdisciplinary approach to dying patients in a palliative care unit

Multiprofessional teams have become in recent years one of the distinguishing features of services, where professionals with different competences work together. The core of our interest is addressed to the equipe of a palliative care ward; in particular, to that series of working activities that consists of communicative acts, as equipe meetings, for instance. Our research focuses on the analysis of the process by which the development of knowledge in multiprofessional practice is built to establish more information on recurrent patterns in the interaction and connect them to the specific context that these are shaped by. In this sense we will underline how components of knowing are shared among team members in constructing medical prognosis and we will analyse the connection among language processes, cognitive activities and social structures. More specifically, we will study the role of language and the context in the definition of linguistic acts in cognitive activities and in hierarchies involved in decision-making processes by exploring and pointing out how it is organised and structured. In particular through the study of talk-in-interaction where interchange of information is realised, we will emphasise how, in the multiprofessional equipe meeting, the realisation of practices and the knowledge useful to collaborative management of ward working life are established. To reach this aim, we adopted an ethnographic approach connected to the analysis of the situated interaction.