Professional identity work in emerging healthcare professions: current perspectives, gaps, and future directions

Healthcare systems are witnessing the rapid emergence of new professional roles, including physician assistants, nurse practitioners, technical physicians, and healthcare data scientists. These occupational groups develop in contexts marked by role ambiguity, contested expertise claims, and fragmented organizational structures, making professional identity work—the processes through which individuals and groups construct, negotiate, and revise understandings of who they are as professionals—a central challenge shaping their development. This targeted conceptual review synthesizes current debates and identifies four strategic dilemmas that arise when emerging healthcare professions attempt to construct collective identity. These dilemmas concern whether to maintain flexible, generative identities or establish standardized, fixative definitions; whether collective professional identity emerges organically from practice or requires deliberate engineering in emerging professions where weak infrastructures leave unclear who has the authority to coordinate identity work; whether to position through differentiation claiming unique expertise or complementarity as essential partners; and whether to pursue jurisdictional control or relational accountability within interprofessional networks. Each dilemma is shaped by internal stratification along career paths, positional power, disciplinary traditions, and geographic locations, while professions simultaneously manage relationships with diverse external stakeholders including other professions, patients, policymakers, and the public. The review identifies critical research gaps concerning the recursive relationship between identity and practice, identity work proceeding without established occupational communities, the neglect of failed professionalization projects, and the underexplored material basis of professional expertise. Professional identity construction is fundamentally political. Understanding these dynamics is essential for workforce policy and professional development models that support person-centered care.