Facilitating Multidisciplinary Team Functioning in Child and Youth Advocacy Centres Using Shared Mental Models

Child and Youth Advocacy Centres are a safe place where children, youth, and families who have experienced abuse can access supports in a single, integrated setting. A Child and Youth Advocacy Centre is a child-friendly facility in which law enforcement, child protection, prosecution, mental health, medical, and victim advocacy professionals work together to assess, investigate, intervene, and provide therapy and support for child survivors of sexual abuse and severe and complex cases of physical abuse and neglect. While these diverse professions are a hallmark of effective Child and Youth Advocacy Centre, how they merge to provide integrated, inter-professional services continues to be an obstacle. This research explored how a shared mental model framework could facilitate multidisciplinary team functioning in Child and Youth Advocacy Centres. Using an exploratory sequential mixed methods design, open and closed card sorting were used to identify the task-, team-knowledge, and shared beliefs required for a shared mental model for the operating model to respond to child abuse at Child and Youth Advocacy Centres. The results of this research indicate that a shared mental model framework can be a starting point to identify areas of strength and improvement to facilitate multidisciplinary functioning. In this research, statements about the reasons and beliefs behind a Child and Youth Advocacy Centre approach were consistently shared. Three areas were identified as opportunities for Child and Youth Advocacy Centres to focus on and improve multidisciplinary service delivery: moving beyond shared beliefs, defining parameters of information sharing between multidisciplinary members, and clarity around tasks that are a shared responsibility.