When policy timelines meet health trajectories: Municipal employees’ experiences of interprofessional collaboration around refugees with health challenges in Norway’s Introduction Program

Nordic integration policies emphasize refugees’ rapid integration into the labour market, operationalized in Norway through the mandatory Introduction Program (IP). However, refugees with health challenges often struggle to meet the program’s requirements, making interprofessional collaboration across health and welfare services essential. This article examines how such collaboration unfolds when supporting refugees with health challenges in Norway’s IP. Drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s concepts of social acceleration, desynchronization, and uncontrollability, we analyse 23 semi-structured interviews with employees from welfare, health, and education services in three municipalities in Northern Norway. The analysis reveals temporal tensions across three levels, organized into three themes. First, we examine how the unpredictable and slow nature of refugees’ individual health trajectories can clash with the policy-imposed urgency to rapidly address health challenges. Second, we show how collaboration across services was experienced as slow and frequently ineffective, a dynamic compounded by structural constraints such as limited healthcare capacity, poor information exchange, and misaligned legal frameworks that local actors could not always resolve alone. Third, we show that while concentrating resources in specialized refugee (health) services may help overcome some collaboration challenges, it risks creating “a system within the system” that can mask rather than resolve underlying structural gaps and potentially generate new dilemmas concerning long-term service continuity. We argue that interprofessional collaboration, though necessary, cannot fully compensate for insufficient healthcare capacity, misaligned legislation, or policy timelines that conflict with health and resettlement trajectories. These insights call for greater flexibility in program duration and stronger institutional continuity across welfare systems.