Samenvatting

Although multi-disciplinary cooperation between professionals is a prerequisite to provideintegrated care in the community, this seems hard to realise in practice. Yet, little is knownabout the experiences of professionals who implement it nor about the organisational fea-tures professionals identify as empowering during this cooperation process. Therefore,a case study of a multi-disciplinary geriatric team was performed. The data-collectionincluded observations of meetings, in-depth interviews and focus groups with professionals(N = 12). Data were analysed inductively and related to the three organisational levels withinthe model of organisational empowerment of Peterson and Zimmerman. Signs of empow-ering organisational features on the intraorganisational level were mutual trust and clearworking routines. On the interorganisational level important features included improvedlinkages between participating organisations and increased insight into each other’s tasks.Tensions occurred relating to the inter- and the extraorganisational level. Professionals feltthat the commitment of the management of involved organisations should be improvedjust as the capacity of the team to influence (local) policy. It is recommended that poli-cymakers should not determine the nature of professional cooperation in advance, but toleave that to the local context as well as to the judgement of involved professionals.