The needs of infants and their families, as well as the needs of children older than 3 years old, often extend beyond the expertise of a single discipline. Teaming permits professionals from different disciplines to work collaboratively to implement services that will support a very young child in reaching his or her potential. To improve the efficiency of the different individuals who provide early intervention services, services should be delivered through an integrated team approach (Bruder, 2010). Most early intervention programs use some variation of three team models —multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary— to deliver services.
Multidisciplinary Teams
Multidisciplinary teams include professionals from different disciplines who typically work with limited opportunities for collaboration across disciplines. Team members may obtain consultations from different disciplines, but assessments are conducted individually by each team member. For example, the speech-language pathologist and the physical therapist may independently conduct the communication and motor-related assessments. Parents may meet with individual team members alone. This professional is responsible for implementing his or her “portion” of the IFSP. For example, the speech-language pathologist only addresses IFSP outcomes related to communication. Discipline-specific members of these teams recognize the importance of the contributions of other disciplines but may have only informal, infrequent communication with other team members. This approach lacks the benefits of team synthesis and, in some cases, may result in duplicative services for families.
Interdisciplinary Teams
Interdisciplinary teams involve professionals from different disciplines conducting their assessments separately but sharing this information with one another. Members may be willing to share development of the IFSP, but they tend to provide services that relate directly to “their part” of the IFSP. Periodic case-specific team meetings usually occur in an effort to manage problems by participating in group decision making.
Transdisciplinary Teams
Transdisciplinary teams make every effort to work together as an integrated team rather than as isolated discipline-specific professionals. This approach not only involves sharing the assessment process, outcome selection (in collaboration with the family), intervention strategies, and implementing services, but it also requires members to function as a cohesive unit by sharing knowledge and skills among the members (Raver, 2009). There is a strong sense of shared responsibility for all team activities and functions. The regular and systematic sharing of knowledge and skills across disciplines among diverse members of a team is called role sharing.
Transdisciplinary teaming uses role sharing to provide a child and family with the benefits of the whole team’s expertise through collaboration between the primary service provider and other team members, who provide indirect support to the family through the primary service provider. Team members actively support each other in developing a good “working knowledge” of the other members’ disciplines. Therefore, if they are selected to be the primary service provider and offer direct services to a child and family, all team members feel comfortable representing their colleagues (King et al., 2009). For example, consider Mason’s transdisciplinary team. When the physical therapist was the primary service provider, she addressed all IFSP outcomes—not just those related to motor development—with the support of the educator, who acted in a consultative role. Later, the speech-language pathologist joined the physical therapist once a month during visits with the family to help integrate learning and communication strategies into home routines. As the primary service provider, the physical therapist represented the educator and speech-language pathologist by coaching the family to continue to use selected strategies throughout the month. Under the transdisciplinary model, no part of the IFSP is recognized as “belonging” to a particular discipline or provider; rather, the IFSP and all outcomes “belong” to the family.
The transdisciplinary team approach provides several benefits to families:
- The approach involves fewer people working directly with the child and family.
- It improves continuity and integration of information to the family, which can enhance embedding interventions into the family’s routines and activities.
- It increases consistency in services and information offered in the family’s selected natural environments, saving the family time and increasing the variety of natural learning opportunities available to the child.
