Abstract
Due to the increase of chronic diseases and multimorbidity, there is a growing need for integrated care. Setting up multidisciplinary clientmeetings, mostly in the patient’s home environment, is an important key to achieve this. The complexity of care increases which makes it more difficult for both the care givers and the patient and his environment to maintain a good overview and efficient care planning to meet client’s needs.
Care as we see it, generally speaking, is more than only health care in a strict interpretation. It also includes wellbeing and this in a broad perspective of different aspects in people’s lives (physical as well as mental health, social needs, integration and participation, spiritual needs, etc). Therefore, care coordination between the patient and the various care givers is crucial to meet all of these care needs and to achieve the care and life goals of the patient.
Multidisciplinary clientmeetings already exist since 1990’s (and even earlier) in Belgium, but the method is still too unknown in some regions or sectors, even though the added value can be clearly demonstrated for the patient and the care givers. The public and social health care insurance funds have invested in people and expertise in facilitating these multidisciplinary clientmeetings and with success. A multidisciplinary clientmeeting is specifically interesting to be organized in a complex care situation. The objective of a multidisciplinary clientmeeting is bringing client and care givers together to formulate common goals and to make a plan of action. The client’s goal is the key to this plan. The facilitator is the organizer of this multidisciplinary clientmeeting. Although this means an investment of time, there is an obvious return on investment in terms of smoother cooperation and more effective care.
The workshop starts with presenting very briefly the unique mission of the public and social health care insurance funds in Belgium and how we try to build bridges between care and wellbeing. We will be presenting an actual complex case and together we will explore how the attendees would deal with this based on their own knowledge and experience. After this interactive part, we will give insights in the method used by our facilitators with special attention for the client’s perspective. We will explain what a multidisciplinary clientmeeting is, who your target audience can be, who are the participants, what is the role of a facilitator and a care coordinator and how integrated care is realized during such a clientmeeting. Not only by using testimonials of several professional and informal care givers, but also with testimonials from the patient and his informal care givers, we will show the added value of the multidisciplinary clientmeeting.