Team Around Me (TAM) is a model for holding case conferences or multi-agency meetings for people who have support and/or care needs, which truly puts the person at the centre of their own support. Team Around Me has been designed for people experiencing multiple disadvantage – a combination of social problems such as homelessness, substance use, mental ill health which are co-occurring (all experienced at once) and mutually reinforcing (one issue makes the other worse and so on). People in this situation often have many different professionals, from different services and sectors, involved in their support – but without an agreed approach to communication, shared support planning and goal setting, people can feel confused about what is available to them, and interventions can duplicate each other or not happen at all.  

The Team Around Me structure can be used for any meeting where professionals need to come together to support someone who has care and/or support needs. Different services call these meetings different things – multi-agency meetings, case conferences, professionals meetings, MDT meetings - and meetings often don’t have consistent structures or agendas. TAM provides a clear, consistent, strengths based, trauma informed and co-produced  way to hold any of these meetings, in any circumstance. 

Team Around Me has three key aims: 

1. To put the resident in the centre of their support, and ensure that their personally identified goals and challenges are central to any actions being agreed and taken.
2. To improve multi-agency working between different services, by ensuring goals are shared, each service is clear on what action they should be taking, and any challenges and risks are discussed and managed collaboratively.
3. To enable services to gather data on service level and systemic issues which affect the people they support, so they can feed this data back to system or area leaders in order to evidence the need for change.