Geriatric Mental Health Disaster and Emergency Preparedness

252 Geriatric Mental Health Disaster and Emergency Preparedness
Interdisciplinary Team
“The interdisciplinary team is comprised of a mix of professionals from diverse
backgrounds frequently situated in the same work site and employed
by the same agency. However, unlike the multidisciplinary team, it has an
identity as a collective which is more important than the individual professional
status of each member.” Interdisciplinary team members share
common goals, collaborate, and work interdependently in planning, problem
solving, decision making, evaluating team-related tasks, and assuming
leadership roles and functions to assure progress. Great import is given to
the interactional processes of the group including methods of communication,
role definition, and negotiation (Takamura & Stringfellow, 1985).
Teamwork
“A special form of interactional interdependence between health care
providers, who merge different, but complimentary, skills, or viewpoints
in the service of a patient and in the solution of his or her health problems”
(Baldwin & Tsukuda, 1984, p. 421).
Quality of Life
Although it is widely accepted that the field lacks a consensus definition
of quality of life (Farquhar, 1995), for the purposes of this discussion, the definition
proposed by Holmes and Dickerson is used. The authors describe
quality of life as an “abstract and complex term representing individual responses
to the physical, mental and social factors which contribute to normal
daily living. It comprises many diverse areas, all of which contribute to
the whole” (Holmes & Dickerson, 1987, p. 17). Gurland and Katz (2006)
classify quality of life under 19 domains, each of which includes a set of
challenges to the adaptive abilities of older persons in order to sustain
quality of life.
Systematic Team Evidence-Based Problem Solving
Systematic team evidence-based problem solving is a seven-stage process
of identifying problems and corresponding solutions to complex patient
management or system-wide challenges that affect quality of life for