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To begin a process of understanding how palliative care organisations are configured to enable innovative multidisciplinary patient care teams and their management in an uncertain, complex and dynamic environment.

A range of literature was reviewed to suggest configuration and characteristics that were tested using semi‐structured interviews with the senior medical staff member at each of three Australian case study organisations. Data gathered from these interviews was supplemented with data gathered from semi‐structured interviews with multidisciplinary management teams and patient care teams dealing with inpatients and home‐care patients.

A hybrid configuration is suggested, based on Mintzberg's typology of organisations. Responses from interviews modify some characteristics of the suggested configuration, though generally appearing to support it. Characteristics of the external and internal environments are described.

Palliative care is rarely written off outside the healthcare literature and comparatively infrequently within it. Configuration is used to suggest the characteristics of innovative teams in an uncertain, dynamic, complex environment. The use and management of multidisciplinary patient care teams in palliative care offers interesting insights for a broad range of organisations.

A contribution to the discourse on the relationship between configuration and innovation based in organisations without commercial imperative, delivering multi‐level care for and by people involved in the end‐of‐life process.

The paper continues a line of publications, beginning in 2002, describing the management of innovation in multidisciplinary palliative care teams. The originality and value of this paper and this line of research is in taking a management view of a unique environment that offers insights and lessons to a broad range of organisations.

This paper seeks to discuss the authors' experiences of multidisciplinary practice in relation to developing home‐based assisted living technologies.

The paper draws on almost three years' experience of working within an ongoing, large, multi‐sited and multidisciplinary Irish national research programme: the Technology for Independent Living Centre. This involved industry and academic partners. Teams of clinicians, physical and social scientists, technologists, engineers, designers and ethnographers worked with older adults to design, test and deliver, home‐based technologies that focus on mitigating falls, keeping socially connected and maintaining or improving cognitive function. The authors' experiences and challenges are organised and presented through their retrospective team building model: ENDEA and through comparison with team building literature.

Learning outcomes and implications for technology focused multidisciplinary practice are offered. The paper concludes that a vital step in developing successful assisted living technologies with and for older adults is to spend resources on building effective, creative and committed multidisciplinary teams and practices.

The model, ENDEA, is proposed which is a blueprint for successful outcomes, through the management and delivery of multidisciplinary research.

In this chapter, we focus on the people component of the technology commercialization process. We review how the need for a variety of skills and knowledge sets creates unique challenges and opportunities for the team, particularly given the complexities associated with commercialization and the need for creativity throughout the process. We suggest that simply having a multidisciplinary team in place does not ensure success and highlight the potential benefits and liabilities. In particular, we highlight the relevance of team composition in terms of professional orientation and social network ties. We then review how team composition influences internal team processes.

In this chapter, we focus on the people component of the technology commercialization process. We review how the need for a variety of skills and knowledge sets creates unique challenges and opportunities for the team, particularly given the complexities associated with commercialization and the need for creativity throughout the process. We suggest that simply having a multidisciplinary team in place does not ensure success and highlight the potential benefits and liabilities. In particular, we highlight the relevancy of team composition in terms of professional orientation and social network ties. We then review how team composition influences internal team processes.

The purpose of the paper is to show that free flowing teamwork depends on at least three aspects of team life: functional diversity, social cohesion and superordinate identity.

The paper takes the approach of a discussion, arguing for a strong need to understand multidisciplinary and cross‐functional barriers for achieving team goals in the context of health care. These barriers include a strong medically dominated business model, historically anchored delineations between professional identities and a complex organisational environment where individuals may have conflicting goals.

The paper finds that the complexity is exacerbated by the differences between and within health care teams. It illustrates the differences by presenting the case of an operating theatre team.

Whilst the paper recommends some ideas for acquiring these skills, further research is needed to assess effectiveness and influence of team skills training on optimising multidisciplinary interdependence in the health care environment.

The paper shows that becoming a team member requires team membership skills.

This paper is the third in a series that will examine the management of innovation by multidisciplinary patient care teams in palliative care in Australia and reports on the existence and use of organisational levers to enable and influence required characteristic behaviours in the teams. These levers work in concert with organisational capabilities to resource the required behaviours. Interviews with management teams in three Australian palliative care case study organisations confirm the existence and use of organisational levers. It appears that levers are available organisationally and utilised where necessary but fall into three distinct groups, those utilised by any person or group needing them, those utilised more specifically by management teams and those utilised by multidisciplinary patient care teams. It is noted that these groups are dependent on the existence of the levers for the optimisation of their efforts.

It is now common place for mental health services to operate using multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) where several health professionals simultaneously maintain their disciplinary distinctiveness and assume complementary professional roles. This requires awareness of other team members' disciplines and good team‐work skills. Yet in Australia, the preparation of health professionals continues to occur primarily in single‐discipline programs, where interaction with other disciplines often only occurs in an ad hoc, time‐limited way during clinical placement. This paper seeks to provide serious reflection on preparing students for the multidisciplinary practice within the mental health system.

The authors introduce a student placement preparation learning package that was developed and trialled with a range of health professional students at two Australian universities. Transformative learning principles underpinned the development of the education materials and related activities, which were designed to sensitise students to the potential problems that arise within MDTs and to equip them with communication strategies for use in their university placement experiences, as well as in their future professional practice.

The very large majority of student placement preparation workshop participants rated the workshop activities as extremely helpful. After participating in the activities, the very large majority of participants strongly endorsed the workshop learning objectives of understanding the different roles of MDTs members, skills required for working in MDTs, principles of collaborative team‐work and respectful, positive attitudes to MDTs members.

The transformative learning approaches to education of health professionals which are described in this paper help students to examine ways to think more critically and constructively about MDTs.

This chapter examines the role of team processes in predicting overall effectiveness for multidisciplinary teams charged with commercializing new technologies. Theory suggests that both social- and task-related processes are essential in order for diverse teams to achieve their full potential. Furthermore, these team processes evolve over time, creating even more complexity related to technology commercialization. A panel of teams is surveyed over time to capture this dynamism and the role of key social and task processes. Results suggest that social team processes, such as cohesion and identification, predict affective performance (i.e., team satisfaction and commitment). Objective team performance is primarily a function of task cohesion and trust. Furthermore, affective performance serves as a mediator between social team processes and objective performance for these high-tech teams. Post-hoc analyses examine the differences in the development of both task and social processes for high- and low-performing teams. High-performing teams have higher levels of task-focused interaction, functional conflict and task cohesion early on in the commercialization process as compared with low-performing teams. Effective teams establish key social processes early on, which provides the foundation for team success.

This paper is the second in a series that will examine the management of innovation by cross‐functional, multidisciplinary patient care teams in palliative care. Two further outcomes of this research are reported here. The first is that within palliative care a number of distinct individual behaviours are identified that act as foundations for the successful development and application of innovative practices by multidisciplinary teams. The second is that interviews with multidisciplinary palliative care teams in case studies in Australia confirm the existence and use of these behaviours. Individual behaviours within these teams are found to fall into two groups: those used by palliative care professionals when working with patients and patient‐based carers; and those used by professionals when dealing with each other away from patients. The purpose of both groups is to generate useful valid information, knowledge and learning that can be transferred across boundaries regardless of boundary type or location.

This chapter provides a brief history of the multidisciplinary process and how it has evolved over time. A rationale for why the process has changed is provided and how involving more professionals to obtain more specific assessment data and provide more direct input aids in the development of the student’s individualized education program (IEP). In addition, a discussion on the incorporation of more reliable and accurate data directly from these individuals shows that a more educationally relevant IEP can be developed for students so that there is a better opportunity for academic success in the school. Incorporating more professionals, when possible, however, requires more planning, but ultimately this process will provide more accurate and reliable data to aid the process for the student, family, and teachers, and everyone will feel more a part of the process.