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20 NOVEMBER 2009
NO 1516
Staff meeting
Whereas the staff meeting is fairly absent from the educational literature, it does receive considerable attention in the study of therapeutic work in group care settings and especially within the therapeutic community approach. We saw in Chapter 3 how the task of providing a 'holding environment' for young people depends largely on the staff themselves feeling supported and contained in a holding environment of their own, which will mainly be provided through a system for staff meetings, consultancy and supervision. This is not a simple matter, however and it has been widely recognised that a complicated pattern of relationships will develop between the staff as a team and the young people as a group. Hinshelwood (1987) has shown how the staff team may be collectively experienced as a 'transference object' by the patients in an adult therapeutic community and how the team will need to focus on understanding this dynamic and continually to renegotiate it with the community as a whole. We also know from the literature on family therapy that clinical teams will often 'reflect' dysfunctional aspects of the families whom they are treating – i.e. they will become similarly dysfunctional themselves (Berkowitz and Leff 1984). The lesson of this experience is that teams need to meet regularly to work at understanding their own responses to the unconscious as well as to the conscious challenges in their work.
ADRIAN WARD, LINNET MCMAHON, PAUL CAIN AND TERESA HOWARD
Ward, A., McMahon, L., Cain, P. and Howard, T. (1998).
The function of the staff meeting. In A. Ward and L. McMahon (Eds.).
Intuition is not enough: Matching learning with practice in therapeutic
care. London and New York. Routledge. p. 146.
REFERENCES
Berkowitz, R. and Leff , J. (1984). Clinical teams reflect family
dysfunction. Journal of Family Therapy, 6. pp. 79-89.
Hinshelwood, R. (1987). What happens in groups: Psychoanalysis, the
individual and the community. London. Free Association.
