Before you begin, have you completed: 

• Enhancing your professional practice: part one
• Enhancing your professional practice: part two
• Enhancing your professional practice: part three
• Enhancing your professional practice: part four.

Introduction

As a pharmacy professional, you need to work collaboratively with the wider multidisciplinary team to ensure safe and effective patient care. You need to have a good understanding of the roles of other members of the multidisciplinary health and social care team if you are to integrate fully and work more effectively with them, both within your own sector of practice and across care settings.

Multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) are the way in which health and social care services are organised for people with complex care needs, particularly those with mental health problems and older people living in their own homes. The MDT brings together the skill and expertise of different health and social care professionals to assess, plan and manage a person’s care and to support the person’s own goals. Most of these roles are based in community or primary care.

The team focuses on keeping people well and living independently at home, or in the community, to prevent unnecessary hospital care. Most multidisciplinary teams will have a designated care coordinator or case manager who is responsible for care planning.