Promoting team meetings for better patient care: how psychiatry’s expertise could prove useful to other medical disciplines

Objective : In a context where most occidental healthcare systems are struggling with budgetary constraints, turnover and burnout, pluriprofessional teamwork has become the center of every hospital reorganization and the key concept of many studies focusing on professionals’ quality of working life. Our paper aims at showing that the knowledge accumulated by psychiatric teams on the matter since the 1950’s could help other medical disciplines take care of their teams.Material and method : We will compare three corpuses: recent research on the relationship between quality of life at work and team functioning, English-speaking research literature concerning teamwork in psychiatry dating from the 1950’s up to the 1990’s and found via PubMed, and written works from the "institutional psychotherapy" movement which were gathered for a doctoral thesis.Results : Pluriprofessional team meetings are an important tool for effective teamwork in healthcare. Early researches and written feedbacks from French and American psychiatrists showed a specific way of organizing team meetings was much more efficient in sharing information and had a positive impact on the climate of services. We describe the pillars of the psychiatric pluriprofessional team meeting : distinguishing between clinical and organizational meetings, inviting every professional to the meetings, promoting freedom of speech in the service and taking decisions collectively.Conclusions : The values carried by seemingly outdated books and articles in the field of French and American psychiatry are still very useful to help organize pluriprofessional teamwork in psychiatric services, and could be transferred to other medical disciplines. Objectif : Cet article veut montrer comment le savoir-faire accumulé en psychiatrie française et américaine depuis les années 50 en matière de théorisation du travail pluriprofessionnel et plus particulièrement des réunions peut bénéficier aux autres disciplines médicales.Matériel et Méthode : Nous comparons trois corpus : des recherches récentes sur le rapport entre qualité de vie au travail et fonctionnement d’équipe, des recherches anglo-saxonnes plus anciennes sur le travail d’équipe en psychiatrie rassemblées grâce au moteur de recherche PubMed et des retours d’expérience du courant de la « psychothérapie institutionnelle » tels que rassemblés dans une thèse de doctorat.Résultats : Les réunions pluriprofessionnelles aident à organiser le travail en équipe. La psychiatrie