Village News ~ Spring 2004

TAS Team Alters Delivery of Client Services
By Michael Palagonia

A persistent and somewhat valid criticism of organizations is that they are ever so slow to alter the ways they do business. Once policies and procedures have been approved, disseminated, and learned, they become fixed and fossilized, regardless of how well or ill they serve the changing nature of their clientele.

At St. Vincent de Paul Village, this criticism is quelled by TAS, or Team Approach to Services. If you sat in on one of three TAS meetings held weekly in Villa Harvey Mandel, you would see, if not the future, then surely another way of doing the present. For TAS is a bold attempt to bring together all the disparate parts that form the whole of the services accorded to clients at Father Joe’s Villages.

Its boldness lies in its effort to transcend program bailiwicks and petty turf quarrels by assembling in one room at one time members of all the departments that have input into a particular client. As Anton Williams, a Village career counselor, says, “We have all the people in the same room on the same page.”

Too often, organizational information about a client is piecemeal or held as proprietary information by one department or another, or regarded, perhaps, as anecdotal and so of little value. Yet fitted with other pieces of information and filtered through different mindsets, a more accurate whole begins to form, allowing services to an individual to be fined-tuned.

Each TAS group splits its session in two parts. The first part is taken up with new intakes, those individuals who are about to move into long-term housing, to develop a case plan for them, and to recommend specific services, if needed. It’s intended to nip in the bud potential problems.

The second part of the TAS meeting reviews case plans presented by case managers assigned to the group. As a client is discussed, each of the attending members of various departments – medical, residential, career and education, to name a few – give information they have, their observations, and their suggestions for the benefit of the client.

In what has to be an institutional leap of faith, clients have the opportunity to provide input by appearing before the group, having already been prepared for this appearance by an assigned advisor. Nothing is implemented in a case plan until and unless there is group consensus, so the fallback position is to agree to look into the matter further and revisit the case later, rather than a rush to judgment.

Rather than view this procedure as an added layer of bureaucracy, it should be remembered that its purpose is to coordinate and tailor services, to give a client an institutional rather than a departmental appearance. Because of TAS, says Williams, there are “less and less special circumstances, less crisis meetings because many client issues are addressed before they happen.”

Furthermore, staff splitting at the Village, the pastime de rigueur of residents of any institution, is severely restricted because notes are compared and because staff members, through TAS, now have a more casual, face-to-face relationship with each other, making it far easier between meetings to pick up a phone or send an e-mail.

While naturally at first, TAS was viewed with some caution and trepidation, it has fit snugly into the workings of the Village, becoming part of the institutional culture and part of its nomenclature. Its success, however, rests upon its ability to provide residents with all possible assistance, and in this regard it’s off to a very good start.