Types of Teams
Multidisciplinary Teams
A multidisciplinary team is composed of members from more than one discipline so that the team can offer a greater breadth of services to patients. Team members work independently and interact formally. Multidisciplinary teams may be thought of as requiring everyone to “do his or her own thing” with little or no awareness of other disciplines' work. Appropriate experts from different professions handle different aspects of a patient's case independently. Rather than integrated care, the patient's problems are subdivided and treated in parallel, with each provider responsible only for his or her own area.
The team's assessments and consultations are conducted separately, with little communication among members. In fact, in a multidisciplinary team, each discipline conducts its own assessment, generates its own treatment plan, implements the plan, evaluates progress, and refines the plan based on its own evaluation. Team members share information with each other, typically at meetings attended by all team members. Although members may choose to use information obtained in the meeting to revise their own goals or intervention strategies, there is no attempt to generate or implement a common plan. Disadvantages of this model concerns the lack of consultation between team members and the lack of an integrated comprehensive treatment plan. The major disadvantage of this model is that it addresses each individual impairment separately, tending to lose sight of how these impairments affect the individual as a whole.
Interdisciplinary Teams
In an interdisciplinary team, a group of professionals works interdependently in the same setting. Separate reassessments may still be conducted, but information is shared and problems are solved in a systemic way with other team members, typically during meetings. (Wieland)
The term interdisciplinary has received frequent use in the healthcare literature for the past several decades, even though there is a disagreement among healthcare professionals as to how that term is defined. Some use the term to refer to situations in which more than one discipline is involved in either a patient's care, or a teaching situation, although the interaction between members of different disciplines may be limited. Others use the term to describe situations where various disciplines are involved in reaching a common goal, and each discipline brings to the job his/her expertise. Still other healthcare professionals use the term to refer to situations where healthcare disciplines specificity blurs, and expertise overlap based on the requirements of the particular interaction.
The last scenario actually most appropriately describes an interdisciplinary model, while the other situations are more examples of various levels of multidisciplinary interactions.
An interdisciplinary team, then, may be understood to be a group of professionals from several disciplines working
interdependently in the same setting, interacting both formally and informally. Separate assessments may be conducted, but team members work to achieve a common goal. Information is communicated and problems are solved in a systematic way among team members, typically during team meetings.
Interdisciplinary cooperation requires integration or even modification of the efforts of the contributing disciplines. The
team process demands that the participants take into account the contributions of other team members in making their own contribution. This approach suggests intersecting lines of communication and collaboration. One definition of the interdisciplinary team that has been proposed captures all of these elements: an interdisciplinary team is a “group of persons who are trained in the use of different tools and concepts, among whom there is an organized division of labor around a common problem with each member using his own tools, with continuous intercommunication and re-examination of postulates in terms of limitations provided by the work of the other members and often with group responsibilities for the final product.”
There are other healthcare team models and you should familiarize yourself with those listed in this table. Glossary of Healthcare Team Models
Success of the team model is contingent upon knowledge of one's own area as well as other team members' disciplines, flexibility of roles, and comfort and skill in giving and receiving education from other disciplines. (Ducanis) To promote effective collaboration, the team must address issues of group dynamics, including role clarification, team unity, communication, and patterns of decision-making and leadership.