Development and evaluation of interdisciplinary team standards of patient care

Interdisciplinary team collaboration is considered an essential component of most health care services. The overall goal of such collaboration in mental health services/ psychiatry is to provide a comprehensive biopsychosocial perspective organized around patient needs and stages of treatment. There is also increasing interest in using an interdisciplinary framework to monitor and evaluate patient care. Unfortunately, little information is available regarding treatment standards that address the issue of interdisciplinary team collaboration. This project was designed to formulate a set of interdisciplinary team standards of patient care. This article presents the standards and provides an overview of the interdisciplinary processes through which they were developed. An empirical evaluation of the standards within one service area--The Affective Disorders Clinic--is also included.