Shake up of MDT cancer meetings planned to speed up treatment

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By Emma Wilkinson

A government-commissioned review has recommended a complete overhaul of multi-disciplinary team working in cancer services to free up staff time and shorten waiting lists.

Under the proposals, which services will start to implement over the next year, multi-disciplinary team (MDT) meetings will not discuss every patient but focus on the most complex or rare cancer cases.

It means routine cancer patients will not have to wait for an MDT meeting for their treatment to begin, the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) said in the MDT Modernisation Report.

The review was commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) following the National Cancer Plan for England published earlier this year.

Currently, resource-intensive formal MDT meetings are often inefficient and not delivering timely care for patients, the RCR said.

The review was done in partnership with Macmillan Cancer Support and with wide consultation across organisations representing radiology, oncology, surgery, nursing and pathology.