Working in multi-disciplinary teams has been found to be important in many industries, including mental health. A multi-disciplinary team is a group of professionals from different backgrounds or work disciplines that collaborate to deliver comprehensive care to address as many of the client’s needs as possible. This is common in office and community settings, but it’s becoming more popular in the private healthcare sector as well because of its value in troubleshooting problems and providing different perspectives to tackle the same issues. Within a private practice, a multi-disciplinary team could look like this - psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, speech pathologists and physiotherapists (to name a few), working together to help support a particular client in the best way possible.
So why is a multi-disciplinary team important?
Generally, multidisciplinary teams benefits both the clients and the health professionals working within the team. Some of the benefits include better health outcomes and increased satisfaction for clients, as well as a better use of resources and feeling of support for team members working with client.
If health services are all in one facility, this can really be a convinience to clients. With less travel and hassle finding a new and trustworthy place, it’s good to know you can find services in one place and the professionals are working together to help. For example, a client can see a child psychologist for Autism Spectrum Disorder, and during assessment, the psychologist notices a slight speech delay with the child. Having a speech pathologist at the clinic can not only provide with the service, but as two professionals from different disciplines with the same goal in mind, you can work together to help this child (of course with consent from the parent). Just knowing that you, as a client, doesn’t have to travel elsewhere is a benefit on its own.
Knowing that your team of professionals are actually interacting face-to-face and know each other well can be reassuring as it can provide a sense of relief that you are being taken care of. Going back to the example before, imagine your psychologist is directly speaking with your speech pathologist and collaborating ideas, perspectives, theories and knowledge from their own discipline about what may be going on, imagine how much more effective the treatment can be when the issue is being tackled from different ends.
Teamwork - that’s always important to achieve better results!
At Melbourne Wellbeing group we believe that providing an allied health service can really benefit our clients. We provide psychological and speech pathology services. Our psychologists and speech pathologists work collaborratively to put the puzzle together and tackle our client’s problems and help them move in the path they want in order to achieve their goals. Essentially, we love working in a team to help our clients achieve the best possible results.
If you feel as though you or a loved one needs some support then give us a call to make an appointment with one of our team of Psychologists or Speech Pathologists.