The ISU’s Team Mapping method is a facilitated workshop that helps groups explore how they can work together to support patient primary care needs as a team. Team Mapping uses local evidence to ensure relevance and co-creation techniques to engage providers and other stakeholders in exploring how a team can be structured and how teams can work together to support patient needs. This is done by mapping out care team roles and tasks for simulated patients on large paper circles of care.
The Team Mapping method engages patients and providers as equal partners in the exploration of various configurations of team-based primary care. This process supports a facilitated discussion that can also strengthen relationships and foster team development. The discussion is often structured around key issues related to scope of practice and individual community level resources. While we have been using the Team Mapping method to support PCN-level initiatives, the method was designed to support clinic level teams. We anticipate that facilitators who participate in this training will use the Team Mapping method more often at the clinic or team-within-a-clinic level to support forming and existing teams.
The Team Mapping method helps teams at all stages of development to better understand how they could meet their populations’ needs with a healthcare team. It is also a way to get team members and stakeholders together on the same page. Team-based care is complex and creating an appropriate and effective team is a continuous process. The benefits of Team Mapping vary depending on the stage the team is at (conceptual, forming, established). Participating in Team Mapping helps build relationships as well as core interprofessional competencies among team members.
The Team Mapping method helps teams develop core competencies in alignment with the National Interprofessional Competency Framework (CIHC, 2010), and its six competency domains:
We recommend including a diverse range of clinical expertise and support roles who may work together as a clinical team in a Team Mapping process. Consider family doctors, other physicians, Medical Office Assistants (MOAs), nurses, nurse practitioners (NPs), midwives, pharmacists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social workers, and dietitians. Also consider patient, caregiver, and community perspectives, including local First Nations. Other roles may also be present depending on the practice design (e.g. outreach).
Team Mapping creates a safe space for teams to explore team structure and function and facilitates useful discussion about how a team could work in specific communities or practice settings. Through the process of Team Mapping, facilitators identify key learnings for a specific community and translate those into actionable steps to improve the delivery of care and professional working environment. In addition, the Team Mapping process is also a team building activity. Team Mapping creates a safe space to explore team composition. The use of personas encourages these discussions to remain patient focused, while also supporting learning about the scopes of practice of team members. While supporting team building, this kind of work can also catalyse a culture shift at the practice level and for individual team members as shared role understanding is developed within a team.
When you are facilitating Team Mapping, it is important to ensure teams are considering care in a realistic future. When the group is unable to come to consensus on a particular role or task or if there are questions that emerge during the Team Mapping session, these can be captured as gaps.
It is important to remind people that a ‘role’ is not necessarily a ‘person’ or provider, and that one team member can cover multiple roles for different patients (e.g. a physician could be a primary care provider for one patient and an on-call doctor for another). When you are facilitating the Team Mapping process, it can be helpful to distinguish between roles and tasks as follows: roles are nouns, while tasks are verbs.
It is also important to start by orienting participants to the map: