Båten måste flyta : en kvalitativ studie om internt kunskapsutbyte och kompetensutveckling bland medicinska sekreterare

Sammanfattning: Many researchers believe that employees' ability to share the knowledge they create, recognize, store, access, and apply in the performance of their tasks; and the ability to make it available to others, is critical to organizational success. Unfortunately, the knowledge of an individual is not easily converted into organizational knowledge, and some research suggests that individuals, for various reasons, sometimes tend to withhold their knowledge. When it comes to more extensive education initiatives and skills development in Swedish healthcare, medical secretaries are a rarely prioritized group. Instead, education is something that often is being arranged locally and internally, which in practice requires the exchange of knowledge to function at least satisfactorily, but even better really good, between co-workers. The purpose of this study is to contribute to a better insight into the experiences, attitudes and behaviours that may exist in the internal exchange of knowledge and skills development within the medical secretarial profession. In this study, a qualitative method was used where data from six semi-structured interviews were analysed with personal narratives analysis and empirically evaluated in relation to Huxham and Hibbert’s (2008) theoretical framework; inter-partner learning in collaboration. There is reason to problematize the exchange of knowledge that occurs in the everyday interaction between medical secretaries. The findings also imply that there is not a single, simple and unambiguous answer to the research question, but rather confirms the complexity Huxham and Hibbert’s (2008) explanatory model demonstrate, with both selfish and altruistic approaches to knowledge exchange. This study also shows that there is a complexity in how accountability versus renouncement of responsibility for knowledge exchange is manifested in the everyday interaction of medical secretaries.