Multi-disciplinary teams can be great for achieving client outcomes. A team with various backgrounds and skill sets can assess, strategize, and execute a client’s case plan much better than if they all worked independently.
However, like everything else in social work, working on multi-disciplinary teams can come with its challenges.
Below we list a few of these challenges and some suggestions on how to overcome them.
1. Poor Communication
Being part of a team in any industry will come with communication challenges. It is especially frustrating on multi-disciplinary teams because crucial information often gets lost from person to person or goes unsaid at team meetings. Sometimes important details or events in a client’s life are only communicated at team meetings, when the team should have already dealt with them.
2. Learning Instead of Planning
Multi-disciplinary teams often spend the majority of team meetings discussing everything that has happened in a client’s life since the prior meeting. By the time everyone is updated, the meeting is over, leaving no time for the team to discuss what they should do next.
This common problem is bad for the team and the client. The team cannot stay focused on their goals, and the client has a lower chance of achieving their outcomes.
3. Not Reacting to Crises Quickly
This problem often relates to the problem of poor communication. When a crisis happens, which could be at any time, someone from the team must respond. Unfortunately, team members have lives outside of work and not everyone is always available.
The ability to quickly communicate with the team and coordinate an intervention to the crisis is very important on multi-disciplinary teams.
4. Coordinating Meetings
Members of the team are always busy. Finding a time to get a group of them to sit down and meet is sometimes impossible. If just one team member misses a meeting, the entire team could fail to learn crucial information.
5. Forgetting to Perform Services
We’re only human, and we all forget things. But there’s nothing more humiliating than telling a client or team that you forgot to perform a service. Everyone on the team has a lot on their plates, so forgetting something on occasion is normal. But when the team works together toward a goal, one person’s failure to perform can bring down the whole team.
The Simple Solution
Caretivity solves all these issues by making communication for multi-disciplinary teams easy.
Rather than waiting until the next meeting to discuss all the complex details a case, Caretivity breaks down communication into smaller pieces more often. This allows teams to address issues when they happen and before they get out of hand.
With Caretivity, teams can deliver the right services at the right time for the right reasons. Consistent communication keeps the team informed, aware, and ready to respond making them more effective.
The needs of the family and tasks needed to meet those needs can be assigned to team members so that no one forgets and progress can be tracked.
Teams can accomplish so much more in less time by using Caretivity. It’s easy for anyone to download and join a team, including natural supports.
Download the app today or ask your supervisor how you can get Caretivity for your teams.
