The Impact of the Multidisciplinary Committee on Cancer Care

Multidisciplinarity is a basic principle recommended in cancer patients’ management. Although, in oncology, clinicians have been used to working in multidisciplinary teams for a long time, nowadays this is becoming an obligatory requirement as the therapeutic decisions are not individual, but in fact collective. The multidisciplinary committee has the role of ensuring the application of its decisions based on “good clinical practice”. In traditional models of multimodal cancer care, patients undergo a process of sequential referral, where they are sent from one clinician to another at different stages of diagnosis and treatment. For example, a patient with lung cancer may initially consult a general practitioner, who refers him to a radiologist, which is followed by a series of encounters with surgeons, medical oncologists, and radiation oncologists. This disintegrated approach can result in a confusing experience for the patients (1). Other areas for improvement in traditional cancer care include: uncoordinated and fragmented care, long waiting times, low patient satisfaction general articles