Resource Center

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the First Annual Interdisciplinary Teams in Primary Care Conference, which took place May 3-5, 1979 in Seattle, Washington.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

Primary care teams are relatively new and unstudied. Roles and tasks tend to be less clearly defined and traditional, territorial and power dispositions are more ambiguous. Such teams are more likely to be interdisciplinary, in the sense that many of these issues are systematically challenged and negotiated from different perspectives. Indeed, some observers view the development of primary health care teams as a significant challenge to traditional relationships and mechanisms in the health care system.
The goal of this paper is to describe the research and evaluation component of the Interdisciplinary Team Training and Curriculum (Team-TRAC) Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. The writers will attempt to share some of the excitement, problems and frustrations of health team research in a programmatic setting. In particular, we will describe the evolution of a "team" approach to such research.