The devil is in the detail: lessons for multi-disciplinary care teams from a local evaluation of coordinated care

The national evaluation report on the first round of Coordinated Care Trials focused on relationships of care coordination from two main perspectives: that of the General Practitioner (GP) as care coordinator; and the GP perception of non-GP care coordinators. As the majority of the Tasmanian care coordinators came from a nursing background and dealt with a wide range of health care providers, in addition to GPs, a more complex local analysis was required. It was found that relations between care coordinators and other health providers varied considerably by profession and new strategies were required to ameliorate the resulting conflict. This aspect of the local evaluation provides useful lessons for analysing and avoiding some sources of conflict in the formation and functioning of multi-disciplinary health care teams.