Professor Matthew Sadlier:

The Mental Health Commission’s report on multidisciplinary team working, published in 2006, highlighted significantly that it relates to the contracts of all the various staff. The report showed there are difficulties with multidisciplinary team working. which are not unsolvable but nobody has ever really examined trying to solve them in this country. They include deprofessionalisation and what happens if there is an attempt to work as an interdisciplinary team. People all have different skills and abilities, which is why it is an interdisciplinary team. If there is an attempt to get everyone to do the same tasks, does it lose people's individual skills and abilities? How do we maintain our individual professional competence while amalgamating the team? It is a complicated process.

Sometimes we conflate service delivery and legislation. The legislation contains the word "must" and we think that will create a conflict in respect of issues where the consultant psychiatrist heretofore has been the person who held clinical responsibility for the treatment of the patient. Our belief is that having one named person who holds clinical responsibility is of benefit to both the patient and the service. As members can appreciate, words such as "consult" are difficult to define in legislation. What does it mean to "consult"? What happens if there is a disagreement and how is it to be resolved? We do not find such ambiguity in legislation to be beneficial in the long run.