Community Teams

Sue. irea emergency (SAE) Actual or likely failure of plant safety. Small - within Federal guidelines Activation ot FOC, deploymem ut euiervcricy monitoring and communication teams... 

To judge the quality of team performance it is necessary to examine the following PIFs distribution of workload, clarity of responsibilities, communications, team structure and leadership, and finally, group planning and orientation. 

Of course as community teams have become established there has been branching out into various more specialized areas of work, for instance in projects to do with recently released prisoners, individuals on court orders, pregnant addicts, etc, and such schemes will not themselves be described as some are very specific to the UK. In Chapter 8, however, there will be examination of the types of work undertaken with the range of special patient groups. 

Mention is made here of some features within general community team working which we have found beneficial in our own services. 

In the middle years of the 1980s some of the new statutory services for problem drug takers started calling themselves Community Drug Teams (CDTs). This title reflected the similarity between their aspirations and those of other Community Teams, particularly Community Alcohol Teams (CATs) which had developed during the previous few years. It is too early to provide a comprehensive description and evaluation of these services this chapter looks at three very different examples in order to provide a snapshot of their organisation, philosophy, and operation. 

Pioneering Community Teams must almost inevitably work on a number of fronts. Equally they have to recognise the potential for conflict between their tasks. Thus commented the Social Services Inspectorate report on drug services in 1985, after examining three new CDTs (Social Services Inspectorate 1985). Where in the three teams described above do we encounter potential or actual conflict ... 

Overtreit, J. (1986) Organisation of multidisciplinary community teams, Brunei Institute of Organisational Studies (BIOSS), Brunei University. Social Services Inspectorate (1985) Project on drug misuse , unpublished report. 

The development of specialist community teams is occurring against a background of increasing concern about the entire concept of community care which has been criticised by both the Commons Social Services Committee in f 9851 and the Audit Commission in... 

The way these factors have interacted in different localities has resulted in the wide variety of form of service delivery grouped under the heading community teams . 

A number of tasks can be identified which community teams hold in common whether their clients are the mentally handicapped, drug or alcohol misusers. Not every team would necessarily see every task identified as part of their role, and the emphasis laid on particular tasks will vary from team to team and sometimes within a team itself. It has already been noted that as teams develop the nature of their roles may also change. 

One of the problems in implementing this kind of approach for any community team, however, is that they are more likely to be in a position where they are expected to liaise rather than co-ordinate. Brown (1986) argues that a team s ability or inability to co-ordinate services will be reflected in the number of service resources which... 

Little has been written in the CAT literature about either the development of service infrastructure or the establishment of mutual self-help groups, although there is a wealth of literature which considers the role of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon which is of relevance here.38 As with service co-ordination, however, service development is not a task which the community team can undertake in isolation. The support received from service managers and planners is crucial in determining the extent to which such a role can be operationalised. 

Overtreit (1986) identified a number of typical problems which community team members often report 40... 

Given the difficulties which have faced multidisciplinary community teams, it seems almost a miracle that any have survived. The central issue is how these teams can be integrated into the existing service structure in such a way as to not only enhance the over-all pattern of service provision, but also to facilitate and support the work done by the team. If this is going to happen we need to be much clearer about what the needs of our client group are, and how we propose to meet them. The fact that so many teams have survived is a tribute to the adaptability and commitment of their individual members. In order to sustain their commitment the teams themselves need to receive the support and commitment of others. If we cannot learn this lesson from existing teams the future of community services looks bleak. 

O Hara, R (1986) The Liverpool Alcohol Community Team, Report to DHSS. 

Overtreit, J. (1986) Organisation of Multi-disciplinary Community Teams, BIOSS Working Paper, Brunei University. 

Program development for all phases involves five tasks. During the first task, EP Coordinators should staff, train, and exercise a crisis communications team. This team forms a critical link between technical experts and the population at risk hence, its members should have skills in communicating with both groups. In addition, the crisis communications team should be represented by a spokesperson who is technically competent to explain emergency conditions clearly and will be perceived as credible because of relevant credentials (e.g., job title and educational degrees), acceptance by other sources of known credibility, or a demonstrated history of job performance that has enhanced credibil-ity [3.36] helpful if this spokesperson... 

To support the IC, there are several onsite teams given specific tasks. Examples are a communication team, medical assist team, decontamination team, a team to report to regulatory agencies, a team to monitor onsite and offsite exposures, rescue team, and other teams as necessary. Each team should have a point person who is responsible for coordinating the activities of the team. 

It is important that the public, neighbors, and news media are kept informed of an incident, if warranted. The public relations person can be given information by the 1C or by his representative. Outside agencies or news organizations should contact the communication person and not just anybody in the plant. For the information from the plant to be as accurate as possible, employees should be instructed to direct inquiries from outside persons to the communication team. This guideline that employees should direct media phone calls to the communications group does not mean that a company seeks to hide information. 

Secondly, we must also always ensure we communicate results in a specific way, and that we do not communicate team tasting and results obtained from expert panels and/or quah-fied panels in similar ways. Building specific software to process the data is of course well... 

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