Hospital Professionals as Dual Agents: A Superordinate Identity to Solve Interprofessional Conflicts in Hospitals?; Comment on “Dual Agency in Hospitals: What Strategies Do Managers and Physicians Apply to Reconcile Dilemmas Between Clinical and Economic Considerations?”

Abstract

The inherent conflict between economic and clinical considerations, between professionalism and managerialism, and between being a manager or being a clinician is widely acknowledged in the sociology of professions. The original article by Waitzberg and colleagues focused on how hospital professionals reconcile these conflicting demands. In this commentary, we argue that their assumption that the considered hospital professionals (managers, chief financial officers [CFOs], chief physicians and practising physicians) are dual agents moves on from the unproductive debates of inherent conflicts to envisage possibilities of reconciling economic and clinical considerations. We conclude that the instrumental use of the term dual agent to include “the other” (the manager or the clinician) in a superlative and inclusive category can be considered a reframing strategy to solve inherent interprofessional conflicts and to implement more collaborative models in healthcare.

Keywords

• dual agent
• professional hybrid
• identity
• healthcare management
• collaborative models
• interprofessional conflict