Crisis Resolution & Home Treatment Teams
Listening to practitioners, and placing the resources where they can make a real impact.
Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Teams: 'Challenges and Pitfalls'
Note: The following is a checklist not a list to be read as an order of priorities
- Practice Development:
- Reviewing policies, protocols and team procedures
- Supporting practitioners in developing their practice
- Team-based supervision
- Role of team development facilitation of away-days
- Examining links with other parts of the service making service integration real
- On going training needs identified with team
- Clarifying the meaning of 'fidelity to the model' implementing the 'essential ingredients' for ensuring good practice (not that there is only one way of doing it!)
- Staff retention & recruitment:
- Ensuring staff maintain good practice
- Motivation
- Supporting staff morale
- Providing appropriate leadership
- Good induction & supportive supervision
- Clarifying the main sources of stress:
- Volume of workload
- Interpersonal issues
- Inter-team issues
- Conflicting management directives
- Sustaining the formal & informal support structures to manage the above
- Time management:
- A crucial asset that needs to be utilised wisely within the Team/Service
- On-call activity aware of the potential for 'burn out' (N.B. You cannot become 'burned out' if you were not on fire in the first place)
- Effective team-working:
- Good effective communication (room to listen room to talk)
- Identifying good team players
- 'Everyone's contribution is valuable'
- Workload:
- Volume of referrals and re-referrals
- Adjusting and adapting to the pace and unpredictability of the volume of work
- Maintaining flexibility & creativity:
- The ability to make a rapid response
- Being consistent through a team approach particularly in response to handling referrals
- Therapeutic risk-taking:
- Risk assessment & evaluation
- Risk management planning
- Reasoned risk-taking decisions for positive gains
- Keeping accurate team records & statistics on what you do:
- A good reminder of all the positive work the team has delivered
- Keeping accurate local Trust statistics
- Aware of the statistical requirements of the Department of Health
- Sustainability:
- Keeping the momentum making the work interesting and challenging for staff
- Sustaining the impact
- Conflict management:
- Creating a consensus within the team
- Managing the inter-team difficulties & stereotypes
- Promoting reflective practice:
- Making better use of existing team meetings
- Creating the priority reflecting on practice can enable more effective use of contact time
- Supervision could support, encourage and enhance such reflection
- Managing change:
- Extending the remit when the time is appropriate (e.g. opening up to services for older people, learning difficulties)
- Embracing positive changes for the service and team
- Creating the time and space to consolidate or reflect on good practices
- Forging good relationships with service user groups in the locality
- Strategies for service development:
- Overlap with other services (e.g. assertive outreach teams, early intervention service, in-patient services, drug & alcohol services, specialist personality disorder services)
- Systemic approaches to thinking Trust-wide, looking at forging key linkages with other parts of the service
Kirt Hunte ~ Team Manager
[South Camden Crisis Response & Resolution Team]
July 2006