As a care coordinator, you’re responsible for chairing clinical meetings, and in some cases, multidisciplinary (MDT) meetings. Clinical meetings are attended by staff at your practice, whereas MDT meetings can involve various professionals such as social care providers, mental health teams, social prescribers and health visitors.
Chairing MDT meetings is a shared responsibility of the neighbourhood coordinator, care coordinator, and lead GP (dependent on availability). The below description of how to handle a meeting can be used for MDT meetings, but please be aware that the way in which you share the minutes will differ.
Meeting preparation
Before any meeting, you should create an agenda. Each practice has their own meeting agenda template, which should look similar to the template shown here⏩
Before the meeting, the following parts of the template should be completed:
- Date of the meeting
- Attendees (and their job titles, if appropriate)
- Patient IDs (name and NHS number) and owner of cases to discuss (name of the requestor)
Once you’ve done this, access the previous meetings’ agenda in Microsoft Teams (Go to ‘Teams’ > Surgery name > Surgery Logs > Meetings Log). Identify any cases which show the ‘Status’ as OPEN and transfer the details of these to your agenda.
Chairing the meeting
- As the chair, you’re responsible for making sure that the meeting runs smoothly and efficiently
- To achieve this, you must:
- Get through each case on the agenda in a timely manner
- Involve everyone in discussions
- Reach decisions
Taking minutes
You’re also responsible for taking minutes during the meeting. This involves completing the ‘Summary/Actions’ box of the template by writing a few sentences under each section:
- The four sections are: Situation, Action to date, Update and Next Steps
- ‘Situation’ and ‘Action to date’: may be done before the meeting (if there were OPEN status cases from the previous meeting)
- ‘Update’: summarise any changes in the case since the situation was first raised
- ‘Next Steps’: summarise actions which will be taken and when they will be completed. Also, include who is responsible for carrying out these actions.
Sharing the minutes
- After the meeting, read over the completed template. Check that it is easy to read, and remove any irrelevant or repeated information
- Share the minutes via Microsoft Teams (Go to ‘Teams’ > Surgery name > Surgery Logs > Meetings Log > ‘New’ > Enter the date of the meeting and attach the minutes)