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PSIRF: What is a multi-disciplinary team meeting?

March 26, 2024

As you will be aware, the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) will replace the Serious Incident Framework on the Monday 1 April – click here to find out more.

What is a multi-Disciplinary team meeting (MDT)?

Multi-disciplinary team meeting (MDT) tool is to be used if further learning or unpacking of the event/incident is needed.

The multi-disciplinary team meeting (MDT) review supports health and social care teams to:

  1. Identify learning from multiple patient safety incidents (including incidents where multiple patients were harmed or where there are similar types of incidents)
  2. Agree, through open discussion, the key contributory factors and system gaps in patient safety incidents for which it is more difficult to collect staff recollections of events either because of the passage of time or staff availability.
  3. To explore a safety theme, pathway, or process. There will be many, but examples are:
  • delayed recognition of deteriorating patients
  • medication errors
  • admission or discharge-related safety events
  • safety issues relating to supported/therapeutic leave from a mental health unit
  • burns or other injuries sustained by residents in a care home.
  1. To gain insight into ‘work as done’ in a health and social care system

What is ‘work as done’?

By ‘work as done’ we mean how care is delivered in the real world, not how it is envisaged in policies and procedures (work as prescribed) or recounted in a walk through or a talk through (work as described)

Here’s a real-life example of an MDT review.