MDTs

All members of your MDT are busy people with many demands on their time.   Let’s assume you are missing the participation of one key stakeholder, and that absence is contributing to a lack of collective success in working on behalf of the vulnerable adults in your community. That absentee stakeholder might have a range of [...]

Greater understanding of each other’s responsibilities, authority, and limitations builds over time.  Building a culture of genuine curiosity, rather than blaming, helps MDT members ask questions about what each of you can and cannot do.  The important strategy is to be able to build better mutual understanding of your work, without targeting any frustration at [...]

The creation of an MDT can emerge from any stakeholder in the county.  It could be that DSS or other key stakeholders would be willing to participate but do not have the capacity to logistically support the MDT meetings.  It could be they don't see the potential benefit of having an MDT. The stakeholders who [...]

A successful meeting provides for equitable participation of all members.  No one dominates, and no one disengages.  Having a designated facilitator can help improve that dynamic. There are many strategies for engaging all participants.   It does help to set that as a goal at the start of the meeting, seek agreement from the group [...]

The reality is that few of us want to attend meetings we don’t find useful or rewarding somehow, and we all must budget how we spend our time.  An initial strategy is to ask people what practices would make the meeting worthwhile.  It could be your meetings are spent in ways that don’t meet the [...]

If MDT members are unable to share identifiable, confidential information about specific cases with each other, one alternative option is for members to present “de-identified” cases to each other, in which all identifying characteristics and information about the vulnerable adult have been removed and key details about the case have been changed to protect the [...]

There is no broad exception to state and federal confidentiality laws that would allow all members of an MDT to share confidential information about a particular adult’s case with each other in the context of an MDT meeting. This is true even if the MDT members all enter into some sort of agreement or memorandum of understanding saying [...]

Finding a way to share confidential information in a legally compliant manner can be challenging, and in many cases, simply not possible. North Carolina does not have a state law that allows for broad information sharing between all members of an adult protection MDT. Some states have laws that allow adult protection MDT members [...]