Are you fluent in Collaborative Care?
Just like the language you need to learn so you can order your favourite coffee at Starbuck's, there is a terminology around Collaborative Care. First learning the terms - which the EXTRA team included in the toolkit they've created - allows people to continue to build and flex their Collaborative Care muscles more effectively.
For example, many people think words like multidisciplinary and interprofessional are interchangeable. Komenda points out they're not; lots of disciplines caring for a person is multidisciplinary while interprofessional means working together collaboratively with very little unnecessary duplication of services focused on the individual needs of the person.
"This is the true evolution of what we're trying to evaluate with our tools. Learning these distinctions means a higher order of functioning. Once people learn what interprofessional care really means and they learn those new words and concepts, they're ready to start looking at themselves," says Komenda, noting the facilitator's guide includes the Cole's notes of what teams need to know to provide a universal baseline understanding of Collaborative Care concepts. "They need to learn the language and what we're talking about before they can dive in and apply what they've learned to their team."