Individual plan in rehabilitation processes: a tool for flexible collaboration?

This article explores how different collaborative strategies between clients and service providers mediate with the quality of individual plan processes in Norway. The main question concerns how clients and service providers interact and perform their roles during their collaboration. An inter-professional group of six health and social researchers collected the data, which consisted of in-depth interviews with 13 clients and 13 service providers. Three interactional discourses emerged from the data: collaboration led by the client, collaboration led by interaction, and restrictive interaction. A complex relationship between the three interactional discourses challenges the service providers' role behaviour in practice. The service provider must accept each client as a unique individual and develop a role performance that takes into account the individual's desired level of participation. This requirement complicates the client–service provider collaboration.