The evidence has been around for a long time.Multi-Disciplinary Teamworking in healthcare leads to better clinical outcomes and experience for patients, and better quality of working life for staff. Yet it is far from universal.
Multi-Disciplinary Teamworking challenges traditional professional roles and demarcations, and can be hard to achieve.
While the general principles that characterise good clinical teams are well understood, their translation into specific clinical settings involves open dialogue, experimentation, learning from failure, and persistence. All of this must take place without any relaxation of day-to-day clinical pressures.
This case study is based on an eighteen month change programme led by Workplace Innovation Limited in partnership with Southern Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland.
The case study offers practitioners fresh insights into how Multi-Disciplinary Teamwork principles can be translated into practice, and we believe its findings are of relevance both to maternity services across the UK and in wider clinical settings.
The programme was led by Workplace Innovation’s Rosemary Exton, a highly experienced change facilitator with an extensive background in the NHS and knowledge of hospital practice in several parts of Europe.
The Workplace Innovation team was supported by the Workage project, an initiative funded under the EU’s PROGRESS programme.
Views expressed in this report are not necessarily shared by Southern Health and Social Care Trust, the European Commission or other Workage partners.
The full case study and short film are available at http://www.goodworkplaces.net/MDT