ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the purpose of collaborative care planning. Care plans had relied on ‘medical diagnoses’ to encapsulate the perceived problems and paid little attention to challenges defined by service users or their carers. The diagnosis-focused, medically propelled care plans were riddled with jargon, medical terms and abbreviations that further alienated the service user. The language of the care plans has been described beautifully by a voluntary service user as being ‘Impenetrable; a secret language used amongst so-called professionals to further alienate us service users and carers alike’. Collaborative care planning requires multidisciplinary team (MDT) input, driven by the nursing process, which has four interrelated stages: assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation. The success of this approach is primarily dependent on the cohesiveness of the MDT working together with service users, carers and other service providers in order to produce a coordinated, coherent and meaningful ‘living’ care plan for the service user across different demographic and clinical settings.
