What is a Multidisciplinary Team?
Multidisciplinary Case Review Defined
Regularly scheduled case review or team staffing becomes the formal process through which professionals share facts and observations that inform team decisions and assist participating professionals to make decisions about cases.
Case review:
- is the process used to monitor cases and bring the knowledge, experience and expertise of the team members together;
- presents an opportunity for each professional to share their unique knowledge and skill with the other team members and allow for full discussion on determining the optimum case goal;
- allows team members to retain their agency identity/mandate while becoming familiar with the other systems involved with abused children and their families;
- helps prevent cases from "falling through the cracks" in the system; and
- enables members to identify gaps in resources and conflicts in service provision.
Results:
The efforts of all team members are maximized because all knowledge is shared and cooperation is built among the participating agencies.
The Process:
- At case review, all agencies or professionals who have information about a case should present so that all issues pertinent to the case can be discussed and appropriate referral made.
- Case review must be seen as helpful rather than a waste of time. To that end, certain policies about case review should be established early in the process and reinforced by the facilitator and those present.
Some MDT guidelines from around the nation include:
- developing an agenda that is distributed ahead of time to all attendees;
- making certain the case review form lists the important issues to be discussed so that all attendees know of any activities they should complete prior to case review;
- making certain that outstanding cases are regularly reviewed until the case is closed by all of the agencies involved; and
- making certain that case review is an opportunity to monitor case progress and not a time to criticize other agencies for a perceived lack of work.
