Marlot Kuiper

194 Connective Routines lot, to meet their pupil’s demands. Tummers & Rocco (2015, p. 817) found similar strategies when they state that: “frontline workers ‘move toward clients’ when coping with stress: they bend the rules, work overtime, and collaborate in order to help clients.” When compared to these findings, one can see both similarities and differences. A clear commonality is that in choosing a strategy, professionals depart from their perspective of ‘what’s best for the client.’ They consider what is most safe and beneficial while balancing their tasks. The strategy I coined ‘work on it’, would in the context of Hendrikx’ (2017) and Tummers and Rocco’s (2015) studies for example mean ‘work overtime’. Still, in this study, work overtime is not one of the possible strategies, as conflicts emerge on the spot. This implies that professionals immediately have to respond to conflicting demands, of which ‘work on it’ demonstrated the least fruitful one, in terms of the satisfaction of the professionals with the result, as of their co-workers (“You should have called me if you didn’t needme anymore. Now I have been working my ass off and rescheduled to be here, and for what? For nothing!”) With this strategy, professionals work on accomplishing the different tasks, often with unsatisfactory results. Workarounds on the other hand, were often considered as ‘the best solution at hand’. Professionals were very much aware of the fact that they bended the rules or worked around formal procedures, but based on their professional judgment, they decided that this would generate the most favourable outcome. In the literature, debates have ensued about whether workarounds are ‘good’ or not, and whether it is beneficial or threatening to patient safety (Collins, 2003; 2012; Debono et al., 2013; Koppel, Wetterneck, Telles, & Karsh, 2008). The workarounds as identified in this study - like outsourcing - did not so much result from professional resistance, but from serious attempts to ‘make it work.’ I think it’s therefore worthwhile to reconsider the notion of ‘non-compliance’ and not identify these strategies as non-compliance, but as pragmatically coping with the situations at hand. 6.6.3 Professionals use three strategies to deal with conflicting demands In this chapter, I laid bare some of the processes that take place at the intersection of routines. Because of multiple, conflicting routine demands, professionals have to prioritize, construct emergencies and negotiate responsibilities on the spot.