Forming Your TEAMS Leadership Team

Recommended Team Members

When embarking on formal efforts to improve school health services, it is important to establish a leadership team that includes a school district health services representative, a local health department partner and a pediatrician partner. The AAP TEAMS Program has demonstrated the value of these professionals working together as a team since they have assets and capacities that are uniquely complementary. By working together, they can offset many constraints that each partner would face if trying to impact school health services in isolation.

Bringing together the school health, public health and medical sectors benefits all 3 systems:

• It helps leverage resources, save costs and avoid duplication.
• Leads to more appropriate use of medical resources by reducing emergency room use and strengthening preventive care and management of health conditions.
• Reduces absenteeism and time out of class, ensuring students are healthy and ready to learn.

While the focus of the TEAMS team is to improve school health services, all TEAMS partners can help each other in their shared work to improve the health of children. Each member of the team can make valuable contributions and can also gain from their participation.

Working Together as a Team

A defining characteristic of a team is its commitment to a common purpose and common goals. Teams work towards identified, agreed upon goals. Each member of the team makes a unique contribution, and all are accountable for reaching shared goals. In forming a TEAMS team, program participants bring together 3 distinct, but complementary, disciplines not just to share information and discuss what each team member does in his/her own sector, but also to collaborate on a common initiative.

Helpful Resources

Coalition Building Resources
This curated collection of coalition tools and resources from SOPHE provides valuable steps on organizing, guiding, evaluating and sustaining coalitions.

Creating Patient-Centered Team-Based Primary Care
White Paper from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality outlining the transition to team-based delivery of care.

CHAMPS Team-Based Care Resources
This page provides an introduction to team-based care and contains tools, articles and guides on implementing team-based care pediatric practices.

This webpage was supported by Cooperative Agreement Number NU38OT000282-04-00, funded by the Healthy Schools Branch - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the American Academy of Pediatrics and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the Department of Health and Human Services.