Our work·Teams and communication
Teams do not fail on expertise. They fail in the conversation.
A series of research and consultancy projects on how multi-disciplinary teams actually talk, led by Dr Cordet Smart and collated into a published book. Manager meetings, psychological safety, risk, and advocacy for the patient who is not in the room.
MDTsInAction. Research and consultancy: how multi-disciplinary teams actually talk.
What happened, and what came of it.
Multi-disciplinary teams are how practitioners in health and social care collaborate. Team interaction and communication are crucial for that collaboration to work, yet teamwork is hard and full of misinterpretation.
Interprofessional working brings particular challenges: people hold overlapping domains of responsibility that they were trained differently to work with. The challenge is how to bring that expertise together, for the benefit of patients and of each other.
A complex programme of research and interventions exploring how teams work, and how a better understanding of conversation-level communication can be used in team development.
Each study looked at real talk in real teams, then turned what it found into workshops and training those teams could use.
The book charts the entire programme and includes a suggested approach that can be transferred to other contexts.
It was written collaboratively across many authors to stay readable for academics, clinicians and anyone interested in how teams actually talk.
The published record
8 peer-reviewed papers.
The work behind this project, in the journals that reviewed it. Each one carries its DOI, so you can read it rather than take our word for it.
- 2018
Advocacy for service users and carers in community learning disability team meetings when they are absent
Interprofessional Care and Mental Health
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98228-1_11 - 2018
Conversation analysis of psychological formulation discussions in adult learning disabilities teams
Interprofessional Care and Mental Health
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98228-1_7 - 2018
Introduction: problems and prospects for multidisciplinary team meetings
Interprofessional Care and Mental Health
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98228-1_1 - 2018
Power struggles in MDT meetings: hierarchy, knowledge and accountability
Interprofessional Care and Mental Health
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98228-1_5 - 2018
Sharing information and retelling stories in a memory clinic MDT meeting
Interprofessional Care and Mental Health
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98228-1_10 - 2018
Training for enhanced team performance in mental healthcare contexts: a workshop and its fit with interprofessional care
Interprofessional Care and Mental Health
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98228-1_15 - 2018
What a discursive understanding of interprofessional team meetings might reveal: intellectual disability managers' performances
Journal of Interprofessional Care
doi:10.1080/13561820.2018.1500450 - 2025
Delivering healthcare in multiprofessional teams: the negotiation of tasks
Journal of Integrated Care
doi:10.1108/jica-07-2024-0039
More of the work
Related cases.
A selection from the same strand. The wider archive is on the our work page.
From the same strand
Devon Digital Accelerator
Devon NHS STP
We provided the change management programme and the research evaluation, delivered as learning reports, to the Devon NHS STP. It supported the rapid rollout of online consultation across general practice, and then fed the national change programme during COVID-19. The work won a Digital Innovation Award, and NHS England subsequently commissioned us to coach the national primary care digital transformation team.
Primary Care Digital Optimisation
Devon, 120+ teams
Our change management service run as a regional programme to over 120 NHS teams across the whole of Devon. Regional conferences, leadership coaching to build change capability inside the teams rather than around them, and educational assets every team could keep using after we left.
NHS COVID-19 coaching approach
NHS wellbeing response
A co-developed training approach to upskill coaches and therapists for the conditions NHS staff were actually working in. Over 1,000 coaches have been trained to date, and the approach was accredited by the Association for Coaching.
Start the conversation
Something like this on your desk?
Tell us what you are trying to land and we will say honestly whether we have done something close to it before, and what we would formulate first.
30 minutes · Senior psychologist · No preparation needed