. Define roles and boundaries
Members of a multi-professional team including social workers, nurses, psychiatrists, and teachers will have different training, ways of working and culture. Social care, health and education are all sectors which have undergone huge change, restructuring and reorganisation. Evolving roles and boundaries consequently affect how professionals work together and can cause confusion. Everyone needs clarity on their own role and to be clear about what other team members do.
Team members must learn to value each other’s contributions, look at how the group communicates and be aware of making judgements and holding prejudices.
Emotions and egos should not get in the way during meetings and discussions. Any action to be taken should be a shared vision owned by all team members.
Professionals might like to consider whether the service user should be considered a member of the multi-disciplinary team, they should consider involving them especially when they are discussing their welfare, and if the service user is in the right frame of mind why not ask their opinions. Source: Accessed on the 20th/4/11
Benefit of multi-disciplinary
Multidisciplinary teams convey many benefits to both clients and the health professionals working on the team, such as improved health outcomes and enhanced satisfaction for clients; and the more efficient use of resources and enhanced job satisfaction for team members.
To ensure optimum functioning of the team and effective patient outcomes, the roles of the multidisciplinary team members in care planning and delivery must be clearly negotiated and defined. This will require consideration of:
- respect and trust between team members
- the best use of the skill mix within the team
- what clinical governance structures need to be in place
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how communication and interaction will occur between team members Source: Accessed on 20th/4/11
Multi-Disciplinary Team Working – Confidentiality.
Every member of a multi-disciplinary team will be required to sign a Confidentiality Agreement before any member of the team is allowed to contribute in a MDT meeting.
It would be impossible to care for patients effectively while keeping their confidentiality absolute.
Healthcare is a multidisciplinary team process – you need to share information about patients with colleagues and other agencies. You also have a responsibility to act in the public interest, when the health and safety of others is endangered. So you will need to become comfortable with making decisions on these boundaries.
The GMC (General Medical Council) advises that any disclosures should be with the consent of patients whenever possible, kept to a minimum and anonymised where this will suffice. You should also ensure that any decisions you make are recorded, together with the reasoning behind them.
Practices should have a confidentiality statement that includes a clause to cover staff when they are no longer working at the practice, and should ensure that all staff receive and sign a copy, including the practice-employed cleaner.
Information between colleagues
All healthcare professionals have a professional principled duty to respect patients’ confidentiality and should only access records if they are involved in the patient’s care.
Whilst it is assumed that patients consent to their personal information being shared among the clinical team for the purposes of their care, they should be made aware that this is the case and told that they have the right to withhold consent. Sometimes, patients may ask for certain – usually extremely sensitive – information to be kept private and team members should respect this. However, in certain circumstances, this information may need to be released if failure to disclose would place others at risk of death or serious harm. Source: Accessed on the 20th/4/11