The cognitive and individual framing of clinical decision‐making has been undermined in the social sciences by attempts to reframe decision‐making as being distributed. In various ways, shifts in understanding in social science research and theorising have wrested clinical decision‐making away from the exclusive domain of medical practice and shared it throughout the healthcare disciplines. The temporality of decision‐making has been stretched from discrete moments of cognition to being incrementally built over many instances of time and place, and the contributors towards decision‐making have been expanded to include non‐humans such as policies, guidelines and technologies. However, frameworks of accountability fail to recognise this distributedness and instead emphasise independence of thought and autonomy of action. In this article I illustrate this disparity by contrasting my ethnographic accounts of clinical practice with the professional codes of practice produced by the General Medical Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council. I argue that a ‘thicker’ concept of accountability is needed; one that can accommodate the diffuseness of decision‐making and the dependencies incurred in collaborative work.