Care Teams: Depression and Anxiety

Course overview

Care teams are crucial for every aspect of healthcare. This course will review care team best practices which contain three important pillars: Collaboration, communication, and role definition as they relate to depression and anxiety. With effective care teams, patient outcomes also improve, including decreased safety events, preventable diagnostic errors, and readmissions to hospitals. As of 2022, nearly 50 million Americans (about 20% of the U.S. population) have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder and nearly 1 in 5 people experience depression and anxiety (National Alliance on Mental Illness [NAMI], 2022). The World Health Organization (WHO) states depression is the second largest global contributor to morbidity (Tian et al., 2022). Therefore, it is important to recognize the need for effective healthcare team approaches to improve patient outcomes for those with depression and anxiety. The goal of this course is to provide nurses and prescribing providers (physicians) in all healthcare settings with best practices to improve their care team approach to patients with depression and anxiety.