Team Around The Worker

Team Around the Family is a model that can work well for families and workers. Lots of professionals form a network or 'team' around the family. The family get the benefit of different people’s help with different aspects of their life. The workers feel that they are able to work together to help the family.

Sometimes though, families find it hard to make use of multiple offers of help; particularly if they find it hard to feel safe enough to trust the 'help'. Similarly, workers might find it difficult as it is likely to be stressful – everyone trying to see the family, not being clear who is helping with what, job’s overlapping etc.

Team Around the Worker is complimentary to Team Around the Family, but shifts the emphasis. Team Around the Worker recognises that sometimes a family can only use one or two key helping relationships and that the helping network might be better off organising itself around this relationship, rather than everyone trying to work with the client directly.

In the Team Around the Worker approach, the person with epistemic trust is the 'key' worker (this means key in the mind of the child/young person/parent, not key as in lead professional). Here is an image that shows how this works: 

And here is a diagram showing how this works in practice - notice the 'key' worker is the person in the network who has the strong, epistemic trust relationship with the person being helped, so we try to organise the 'help' through that relationship