The House Model of Care Teams
Practice Tools
Inspired by Assoc Prof Michael Gordon’s ‘rules of good shared care’ and the Core Principles & Values of Effective Team-Based Health Care (2012), this model is being developed as a teaching tool for use across sectors. These ideas have been workshopped at a series of talks to interdisciplinary groups working in mental health, education, child safeguarding, out of home care, and community services.
Shared Understanding
From the Leeds City Council, Rethink Reformulate can be used as a collaborative process to form a shared understanding of a case. It follows a 6P formulation model and provides guidance for a group to combine the information they have each gathered and the lenses each professional brings to promote relational intervention.
Developed by two clinicians from the Melbourne based Mindful Centre for Training and Research in Developmental Health, this paper provides guidance and context to the process of case formulation using a Ps model.
A Terms of Reference (ToR) is a document which outlines the purpose and scope of collaborative work. It outlines the ways in which a group will communicate,
Clear Communication
Having a clear agenda for meetings and an associated action record is not just a critical tool to use time together effectively but to translate discussion to outcomes over time. A key role of the meeting chair is to designate someone to the role of minute taker.
Meta-communication is the process of talking about how it is that we’re talking - How can we do it best? What barriers have we been facing? How can we overcome sticking points to keep information flowing and care team members connected?
Role Boundaries
One way of thinking about our Role Boundaries is via the connection we individually have to our challenging work. Dr. Vikki Reynolds created a reflective tool she called the ‘Zone of Fabulousness’ to guide professionals in exploring their boundaries.
RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. RACI matrices are used in complex projects where professionals must collaborate efficiently to clarify how different areas of responsibility relate to individual roles.
Ensuring an alignment between a care team member’s authority and their responsibility can help clarify where confusion and conflict come up. Professionals should have authority over what they’re responsible for and be responsible for what they decide on.
Mutual Respect
The Bells that Ring is a group supervision model developed by Kerry Proctor, an Australian Psychologist and Family Therapist. It is a structured way to reflect on a case including exploring what ‘bells’ the case rings in a practitioner.
The 4Ps model was developed based on Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) by Phyllis Annesley and Lindsay Jones (2016). It is designed to offer a framework for reflecting upon professional interactions and responses within therapeutic environments.
Change Markers
The link to the right will take you to a page on this website with an embedded web app to generate Spider Graphs with customizable labels on a 5-point scale. You can enter multiple layers representing time-points or multiple members of a system.
The Ishikawa tool or ‘Fishbone Diagram’ is used to map out a goal from current state to achievement. In between, large ‘bones’ are drawn to represent barriers to achieving the goal and smaller ‘bones’ are drawn to represent the steps to overcome these.
The Looking After Children (LAC) domains provide a developmental framework of needs for Out of Home Care. Developed in Victorian Child Protection, these can be used to align understanding for Care Teams supporting children in many contexts.
Roof Reflections
This tool was developed specifically to promote reflection and discussion around how your care team is tracking on the elements of the House Model. Look at each element of the structure and explore how many pluses or minuses the team gets to identify areas of collaborative practice that may require exploration and maintenance.
Reflecting using The Outer Layer
The concept of wrapping an 'Outer Layer' around the care system draws on both systemic and psychodynamic traditions. This Outer Layer functions as a form of care team containment where a person or people outside the system help to hold and process overwhelming emotional experiences that has spilled into professionals. In complex care systems, this container must operate at a systemic level, providing a reflective boundary that helps process the team's collective emotional experience.