Moving targets: Medical resident professional identity formation in interprofessional teams

The process of professional identity formation (PIF) plays an important role in how physicians interact with interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP). In healthcare, a focus on profession-specific education often creates uniprofessional identities that serve as barriers to interprofessional teamwork. Interprofessional socialization (IPS) combats this challenge in an iterative process of breaking down interprofessional barriers and encouraging interprofessional role learning with the goal of forming interprofessional identities. To understand the IPS process of medical residents working in clinical learning environments, we explored medical resident PIF in interprofessional teams. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 41 medical residents rotating on team-based microsystem units. Thematic analysis indicated that as medical residents progressed through training, interprofessional physician identities were constrained by poor understanding of interprofessional roles, medical hierarchies, lack of frameworks for physician leadership roles in interprofessional teams, and insufficient time for interprofessional relationship-building. We used these resident-reported barriers to inform recommendations about how to nurture interprofessional identities sooner in graduate medical education (GME) in order to accelerate effective IPCP.