"Socializing Safety Professionals for Collaboration: Communication Strategies for Interprofessional Training"

When professionals organize in response to complex problems, they often work in interprofessional teams. In these teams, individuals must represent their own professions’ values and goals while, at the same time, collaborating with people who represent other professions’ values and goals. Typical professional socialization processes prepare workers to resist, rather than embrace, interprofessional collaboration, but new approaches to interprofessional socialization are emerging. This study examined the communication practices of trainers at a public safety training institute. Using qualitative methods, I identified three implicit tenets of the institute’s interprofessional training activities: (a) articulate the reasons for learning to work together; (b) familiarize trainees with pre-established systems for soliciting help and coordinating across organizational boundaries; and (c) promote the value of adaptability. These strategies could apply not only to emergency management but to any industry that engages interprofessional teams or interorganizational collaboration.