Organizing Care across Boundaries: Coordination, Professional Work, and Lived Experiences

Patients move between hospitals, primary care, rehabilitation, social services, and home-based care, while professionals, civil society actors, patients, and relatives collectively navigate and coordinate diagnosis, treatment, information, and responsibility across fragmented systems. These transitions often expose uncertainties concerning responsibility, accountability, and continuity of care, particularly for those with complex needs, or where diagnoses are multiple, contested, or absent.

This session invites theoretical and empirical contributions examining how healthcare is organized, coordinated, and experienced across healthcare and welfare systems. We are interested in the organizational and experiential work involved in creating coherence and securing treatment when care spans multiple organizations, professions, diagnoses, or sectors. While coordination has become a central policy ambition, it remains a persistent sociological challenge involving negotiation, discretion, and boundary work. Contributions could include questions such as:

• The relationship between coordination and organization: How are care pathways, diagnostic trajectories, and transitions organized across fragmented health and welfare systems? What arrangements facilitate or complicate coordination across sectors, professions, and diagnoses?
• The relationship between coordination and care experiences: How do patients and relatives navigate fragmented systems? What work do they undertake to sustain continuity, negotiate responsibilities, and make sense of care? How are uncertainty, inclusion, and access shaped by organizational arrangements?
• The relationship between coordination and professional work: How do professionals coordinate care across boundaries? What kinds of professional work are required to hold fragmented care pathways together? How are roles, responsibilities, and judgment negotiated when care increasingly relies on organizational and digital technologies?