Health care work is interprofessional work. Nurses and physicians, members of the professions whose close collaboration is foundational to health care delivery, continue to be educated separately in most academic institutions. Their work also is organized in ways that challenge interprofessional collaboration. Understanding workplace realities faced by nurses and physicians, separately and jointly, is a starting place for exploring how to support ethically sound interprofessional work. In this essay, we look most closely at the work of nurses and physicians who (...) care for seriously ill hospitalized patients, a patient population closely associated with ethical challenges. (shrink)