Introduction

With the introduction of modern drug treatment methods in psychiatry, the custodial mental hospitals opened their doors in the late 1950s. The ability to control disturbed behavior and discharge patients back into the community led to the realization of rehabilitation possibilities; the emergence of programs aimed at restoring the psychiatrically disabled person to full functioning and reintegration into home and community. This period coincided with the development of health care professions additional to medical and nursing. Social work, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and psychology evolved and emerged into distinct and autonomous health care disciplines. Music therapy, psychodrama and recreational therapy followed them to achieve health care profession status.

Recognising that the effective operation of a psychiatric treatment program requires the active participation and cooperation of members of these health care disciplines, psychiatrists gradually included them in treatment teams. The rise of the community psychiatry movement in the 1960s and 1970s gave further impetus to the concept and practice of multidisciplinary teams. Now, the concept of team work in psychiatry has evolved to such a degree, that multidisciplinary team work has become axiomatic in psychiatric care.

Definition

The word ‘multidisciplinary’ is not easily found in textbooks of psychiatry published in the 1970s and 1980s. There are few references to multidisciplinary team work in standard psychiatric texts.

The term is not found in the major medical dictionaries. In the 1990 Third Edition of Mosby's Medical Nursing and Allied Health Dictionary, ‘Multidisciplinary health care team’ is defined as ‘a group of health care workers who are members of different disciplines, each one providing specific services to the patient’.