Interprofessional Care and Mental Health: A Discursive Exploration of Team Meeting Practices
Edited by Cordet Smart & Timothy Auburn
Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
371 pages
145 CAD (eBook), 180 CAD (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-3-319-98227-4
Review by: Kristina Stein, BA, Concordia University of Edmonton
Interprofessional Care and Mental Health: A Discursive Exploration of Team Meeting Practices presents the topic of communication in mental health multidisciplinary teamwork. Throughout the text, editors Cordet Smart, a lecturer in the school of psychology at the University of Plymouth, and Timothy Auburn, an associate professor in the school of psychology at the University of Plymouth, provide ample supporting evidence and research findings that stress the importance of communication in multidisciplinary team meetings and settings. Strong evidence is presented as the authors pull information from those practitioners, patients, and researchers who participated in the MDTsInAction research project.
The book starts off by providing a literature review that reveals the inherent challenges of multidisciplinary team meetings and the problems that may arise when poor communication occurs. The introduction also renders the MDTsInAction methods and goals. Following, the text is organized into 16 chapters that are allocated into five sections. The first section introduces the principles of conversation analysis and discursive psychology as these methodologies are advocated throughout the book to understand the organization of social encounters in team meetings. The following sections discuss the functions of team meetings, the clinical application of these meetings, patient’s experiences in a multidisciplinary setting, and the interventions that arise from the presented research.
The text provides theoretical and empirical discussions with substantive references to emphasize how a multidisciplinary team of therapists can assemble greater results for a patient when there is more and more communication and cooperation between the clinicians as well as the patient. Throughout the book, the central ideas are strengthened as the authors present a diverse set of examples drawn from the MDTsInAction project. The variety of cases successfully illustrate the significance of communication in multidisciplinary meetings throughout various mental health needs that include a diverse range of specialities in a clinical team. With these demonstrations of various applications of multidisciplinary teamwork and the different compositions of groups, the text clearly justifies it’s claims and main ideas.
Overall, the book is a comprehensible and informative piece of work that can be used to benefit anyone working in a mental health multidisciplinary team or for those wanting to conduct further research on the topic. For those wanting to expand on this body of research, some chapters include tips for doing further research. Further, it is a very useful tool for scholars and practitioners to consider and apply when working as a team with other mental health practitioners. Tips and ideas can be easily absorbed as each chapter concludes with recommendations for interprofessional team working, making this book an impactful tool.