Working in a Multidisciplinary Team Around the Autistic Child

🤝 The challenges of teamwork in ASD

Autism is a condition that simultaneously affects communication, social interactions, behavior, sensory processing, cognition, and motor skills. No professional can cover all these dimensions alone. Therefore, working in a multidisciplinary team is not a luxury but a necessity to provide comprehensive and coherent support that takes into account the person in all their complexity.

However, teamwork does not come naturally. Different disciplines have their own theoretical frameworks, specialized vocabulary, assessment methods, and intervention priorities. Without training in interprofessional collaboration, the risks are numerous: contradictory objectives, incompatible approaches, lack of coordination in interventions, loss of information between participants, and confusion for the family receiving divergent messages.

From Multidisciplinarity to Interdisciplinarity

It is important to distinguish between multidisciplinary work, where each professional operates in their field without real coordination, and interdisciplinary work, where professionals share a common frame of reference, define objectives together, and coordinate their interventions in an integrated manner. Interprofessional training aims precisely to develop this capacity for interdisciplinarity, which is the condition for truly comprehensive and coherent support.

👥 Know the role and skills of each professional

The first step in teamwork is mutual knowledge of the roles and skills of each professional. Too often, professionals have an unclear view of what other team members do, leading to unnecessary overlaps or, conversely, gaps in care. Interprofessional training clarifies these roles and creates synergies between different skills.

Knowing each other's roles helps avoid inappropriate requests and mobilize the right skills at the right time. When an educator observes problematic eating behavior, they know they must refer to the speech therapist and the occupational therapist. When a teacher notices difficulties in handwriting, they can consult the occupational therapist or the psychomotor therapist. This smooth flow of information between professionals is a sign of an effectively functioning team.

📨 Effective interprofessional communication

Communication among team members is the glue of interdisciplinary work. It must be regular, structured, and targeted to be effective without being time-consuming. Interprofessional training develops the necessary communication skills: knowing how to convey relevant information concisely, using accessible vocabulary for all team members, and actively listening to the observations of other professionals.

Effective team meetings

Team meetings are the privileged moment for interdisciplinary coordination. To be effective, they must be structured with an agenda, a limited duration, and clear objectives. Each professional presents observations and progress in their field, and the team discusses necessary adjustments to the personalized project. The meeting minutes formalize the decisions made and the actions to be implemented by each professional.

• Synthesis meetings: in-depth review of the personalized project with all professionals, ideally every quarter
• Regulation meetings: short and targeted exchanges on specific situations requiring quick coordination
• Written transmissions: liaison notebooks, monitoring sheets, and reports shared among professionals
• Informal exchanges: spontaneous exchange moments that complement formal coordination mechanisms

📝 The shared personalized project

The personalized project is the central document that formalizes the objectives, means, and evaluation criteria of the support. In an interdisciplinary approach, this project is co-constructed by the entire team in consultation with the family and, when possible, with the autistic person themselves. It ensures the coherence of interventions by defining cross-cutting objectives that are worked on by each professional in their area of expertise.

For example, the objective "develop functional communication skills" will be worked on by the speech therapist in rehabilitation sessions, by the educator in daily activities, by the teacher in class, and by the parents at home. Each professional adapts their strategies to their intervention context while respecting the common framework defined by the team. This coherence is essential for the autistic person who needs stable and predictable reference points.

🛠️ Coordination and information sharing tools

Several tools facilitate coordination among professionals working with an autistic child. The choice of these tools depends on the configuration of the team (same location or dispersed stakeholders), available resources, and the desired level of formalization.

Digital tools offer interesting solutions for real-time information sharing: collaborative platforms, professional messaging applications, shared online files, and goal tracking tools. These solutions are particularly useful when professionals work in different locations and do not meet physically. Interprofessional training includes mastering these tools and best practices for information sharing while respecting professional secrecy and data protection.

The liaison notebook

The liaison notebook, whether paper or digital, remains a fundamental tool for daily coordination. It allows each stakeholder to record their observations, noted progress, encountered difficulties, and adjustments made. The family also contributes by reporting significant daily situations. This living document, shared by all stakeholders, ensures a continuity of information essential for the coherence of support.

🎮 COCO THINKS and COCO MOVES: a cross-functional tool for the team

The COCO THINKS and COCO MOVES program from DYNSEO is a tool that can be used cross-functionally by the entire multidisciplinary team. Each professional can integrate it into their practice according to their specific objectives, while contributing to a common tracking of the child's cognitive performance.

A common language for the team

The use of a common tool like COCO creates a shared language around the child's cognitive performance. The psychologist can use it to assess executive functions, the occupational therapist to work on hand-eye coordination, the educator to propose a structured activity, and the family to maintain stimulation at home. The data collected by each stakeholder feeds into a global tracking that enriches synthesis meetings and facilitates collective decision-making.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Integrating the family into the team

Parents are the essential partners of the support team. They know their child better than anyone else, observe their functioning in daily life situations, and ensure continuity of support between sessions. Interprofessional training includes developing specific skills to integrate parents into the care process in a respectful and effective manner.

Integrating the family means informing them transparently about objectives and methods, gathering their observations and priorities, providing them with strategies applicable in daily life, and supporting them in their role as caregivers. Parents are neither passive spectators nor therapists to be trained, but partners whose parental expertise and knowledge of their child are essential to the quality of support.

DYNSEO's guides for supporting autistic children and supporting autistic adults are useful resources to share with families to help them understand the stakes of support and strengthen their role in the team.

🎓 Training with DYNSEO

DYNSEO offers a certified Qualiopi training “Supporting a child with autism: keys and solutions for daily life” which constitutes an ideal common knowledge base for multidisciplinary teams. By taking this training together, professionals from the same team share a foundation of knowledge and skills that subsequently facilitates the coordination of their interventions.