It’s almost 1.15pm on a Tuesday and that means that I head into our little Academy space for our MDT.
In hospital healthcare MDT is short for Multidisciplinary Team Meeting.
If you or any of your relatives were sadly unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with oral cancer your case would end up at the head and neck MDT in your local hospital (almost certainly).
My wife has attended MDT’s in children’s cancer for 2 decades and for several years now we’ve had our own little version of that in the Clinic.
We use some tech to set this up (Asana project management) and anyone can drop a case in there through the week.
We put down the projector screen and look at photographs and X-rays and patient cases at the start or in the middle if there’s a problem or difficulty or at the end if it’s not good enough or if it’s brilliant and we want to celebrate.
Some of our friends send us cases and ask us for opinions and they go through MDT as well.
We have clinicians and nurses involved in treatments and treatment coordinators and other members of the team and we have 45 minutes of cases every single week.
We write minutes and the entry for each patient goes in their case notes so people can see that we discussed it and considered it and thought about it and about 50% of the time when I present a treatment plan people tell me that I’m an idiot and the treatment plan changes to something better than that which I would have figured out myself.
We tell our patients that we do it and they think it’s extraordinary and you can do it to.
Regardless of the size of your practice you can set it up there and meet once a week and talk about any patient cases you want because reflection makes it better.
You can do it virtually, you can do it on Facetime, you can do it anywhere.
Opening up our thoughts, our plans, our aspirations and hopes for the patients that we treat is a beautiful thing.
Going off from a meeting and finding something out that we didn’t know and bringing it back next week and then getting the outcome that we’d hoped for because we’d shared and discussed, surely is the way healthcare should be carried out.
If I wanted to do 1 thing to generate a team culture and to make treatment better for my patients, I’d set up an MDT.
Blog Post Number - 3203
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