Multidisciplinary Care (MDC)

“Multidisciplinary care is a collaborative approach to treatment planning and ongoing care throughout the treatment pathway. Multidisciplinary care aims to ensure that members of the treatment and care team can discuss all relevant aspects of a cancer patients physical and psychosocial needs along with other factors impacting upon the patients care”

Department of Human Services

Further information available at: www.health.vic.gov.au/cancer

Models of MDC

There are several models of MDC, however they can be broadly classified into traditional standard sequential or strong as illustrated in the following diagrams (1 & 2)

Diagram 1

Diagram 2

In rural and regional settings the standard sequential model of multidisciplinary care predominates for the following reasons:-

• the relatively small number of patients with a particular cancer other than in the high volume tumour streams
• geographical dispersion of patients and providers
• general rather than sub speciality nature of most cancer specialists
• the significant non cancer workload of most specialists who do cancer work

It will not be feasible in the short term to adopt the strong simultaneous multidisciplinary care assessment process but a process that will achieve the same outcomes is proposed. (See below).

ii) Timeframe of achievement

Short term

• Establishment of local collaborating tumour groups
• Appointment of lead clinicians
• Establishment of regular MDT meetings

Medium term

Formalisation of the multidisciplinary care meetings to include recorded actions, recorded recommendations and audit of actions against those recommendations.

Long term

The development of multidisciplinary care meetings for the high volume specialties which are prospective that make specific recommendations that are fully audited and include all patients in the region by video conferencing facilities.

Local initiatives related to MDC/ GICS

• MDM's Establishment etc
• Multidisciplinary projects and priority outcomes
• Discussion paper

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