One hundred million years ago, I worked in maxillofacial surgery at Queen's in Nottingham and Derby Royal Infirmary.
As part of that work, we were involved in an MDT process with neck cancer.
I didn't attend many MDT meetings, but I was aware of what they were, and from time to time, I was able to access them.
An MDT meeting brings together a group of clinicians and healthcare professionals from different perspectives to collaborate for the benefit of patients, including diagnosis, treatment, and complications.
Basically, the way it works is that anyone as part of the group can list a case for the MDT and material which is relevant, including the history of the patient, photographs, X-rays, CBCT scans, etc. The case is then discussed among the clinicians and the healthcare professionals within the group. A consensus is achieved, and this is minuted (and usually placed in the patient's notes).
It's an extraordinarily productive and effective process on multiple levels.
1) It's a wonderful learning experience for the clinicians involved. People attend an MDT weekly, and they can only learn from what they see and from other clinicians with other perspectives.
2) Treatment plans change as a result of the perspectives involved to become better, and this is extraordinary for patient outcomes.
It builds camaraderie and a feeling of empathy among team members as they see the different levels of work, perspectives, and the attitudes they bring.
Many years ago, I decided it would be a good idea to invent an MDT at The Campbell Clinic, and it started (I can't remember how many) years ago. Basically, the way we set this up is that we have an agenda which sits on our Asana task lists, and we can fill this in from anywhere if we see a patient or remember that we've seen a patient. We're limited to 8/10 cases a week (sometimes firing to get over that if we're busy), and we have it in the academy space on the big screen, sometimes with people dialling in with different areas of expertise.
Our MDT has nurses, treatment coordinators, hygienists, and clinicians of all disciplines.
People come to the MDT who don't have cases on the MDT just to see what's going on and what we can see, but it has been one of the great joys of the practice of sharing, learning, and understanding.
I put many of my new cases on MDT and all of my complications. It is so reassuring to put your complications in front of a caring group of practitioners and colleagues who can help you figure out ways to help the patient out of trouble, but it's also extraordinary how often my treatment plans change as a result of the group discussions that we have.
I explain this openly and clearly to my patients, and I ask them to give me a little bit of room when I take this to the MDT.
What the patients realise is that they're getting way more heads than just mine, and the value of the MDT discussions to them is extraordinary.
We've been running this for years, and it is very special; you should set it up now, too. You can have it in your own practice, and you can have it amongst a group of practices; it's really easy to set up virtually. Just make sure you get your GDPR and data sharing right, and you're good to go.
Now we're also counting how good it is, so we can publish it, and I really, really need your help with this if you possibly can be arsed.
Cintia Fukuoka is our ITI scholar at the Clinic, and she's due to leave at the end of next month after having been here for a year from Brazil.
One of her projects, in conjunction with our friend Fadi Barrak and the guys at UCLan, is a study on the Perceptions of dental Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) meetings. There's an information sheet here about the study, and the study itself, which has 21 questions, is here. I have just completed it, and it took me about 3.5 minutes - please, please, will you be arsed just to complete this? It doesn't matter if you've never seen an MDT before or never heard of it; it's so critical and helpful to us that we get some responses to this just to validate it in research.
Go on, set it up now. The best time to build a tree is always 100 years ago.
Blog Post Number - 4207