Multidisciplinary team working will be increasingly essential as cancer care becomes more complex. However, they need to be improved to effectively enable and empower clinicians to use them as spaces to rethink service design, drive quality improvement, and generate care plans for complex patient cases.
Multidisciplinary team meetings are crucial but need a radical overhaul. Given the workforce shortages the profession is facing, with 80% of cellular pathologists believing current staffing levels are inadequate to meet growing clinical demand and ensure long-term sustainability of their services, reform is essential to make services more efficient and ensure their focus optimises patient care.
Dr Bernie Croal President
There is broad buy-in across the cancer care community for such reform and the College has lent its support to a briefing developed by the Royal College of Radiologists in collaboration with the Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of Nursing, and Association of Cancer Physicians, to strongly recommend that the National Cancer Plan commit to reform multidsiciplinary team meetings, and we stand ready to help lead this change.
Read the multisociety proposals for reforming multidisciplinary team meetings here.
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