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Government policy concerned with the modernisation of the National Health Service (NHS) has urged nurses and others working in the health services to become more collaborative, adopt a flexible approach to role boundaries and establish clear lines of accountability for the quality of clinical care. However, the governments clinical governance agenda gives little recognition to the ways in which health care professions have been hierarchically ordered in the past and how these historical relationships may continue to shape multidisciplinary working in the modernised NHS. At the same time, there is little acknowledgement of the ambiguous nature of accountability where role boundaries become blurred. This is particularly the case for nurses.The Nursing and Midwifery Council (2002a), for example, reports that many of the queries they receive and many of the professional conduct cases they hear arise from nurses uncertainty or lack of awareness about their accountability. Accountabilit ...