Nazneen Adam
Occupational Therapist
I recently participated in the initial intake interview of a child with a comparatively rare condition that no one at The Essential Learning Group had dealt with before. We assembled a purpose-built multidisciplinary team to assess the child’s difficulties and form a comprehensive therapeutic plan.
Initially, I was somewhat apprehensive about the process. I anticipated that professionals from so many disciplines would take divergent views on the best plan for treatment, and that I would be called upon to defend my view that Occupational Therapy would have an important role to play in the child’s treatment.
I was most pleased to discover that our opinions were largely in accord, and that devising a balanced multidisciplinary/co-treatment plan was beneficial to the client, and that each of us quite readily recognized that a broad-based collaborative approach would accomplish a far better outcome than would working only in our individual disciplines. Indeed, we all recognize that without the input of everybody involved, we will likely never achieve our treatment goals.
Simply by observing our client together, by sharing our observations, we learned a great deal from one another’s knowledge and experience, and to apply this knowledge in situations reaching far beyond the needs of the one client at hand.
We were all delighted to learn that our differences in expertise and cultural background did not hinder our collaborative process; it strengthened our decisions. The differences made it possible to come up with the best plan for the needs of our client.