Health Professionals’ Views on Key Enabling Factors and Barriers of National Multidisciplinary Team Meetings in Cancer Care: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Purpose

Multidisciplinary team meetings (MDTMs) are an integral component of cancer care. Increasingly, virtual MDTMs are used to grant high-quality treatment recommendations across health-care regions, which expands and develops the local MDTM team to a regional or national expert network. We investigated health professionals’ experiences from national, virtual MDTMs for rare cancer with a focus on key enabling factors and barriers.

Methods

Health professionals who participate in seven national, virtual MDTMs in Swedish health-care responded to a questionnaire exploring key enabling factors, barriers and opportunities for MDTM development. Conventional content analysis was used to identify thematic categories based on free-text responses.

Results

Participants´ perspectives could be assigned into three categories ie, a national arena with potential for comprehensive knowledge and collaboration, prerequisites for decision-making and organization and responsibilities. These categories consisted of nine sub-categories that referred to, eg, collective competence, resources, clinical research, case discussion, meeting climate, patient-related information, MDTMs potential, referral and technical insufficiencies.

Conclusion

National, virtual MDTMs represent a new multidisciplinary collaborative arena that introduces benefits as well as challenges. Consideration of key enabling factors and barriers may ease implementation and further optimize MDTMs in cancer care.

Keywords:

• tumor board
• rare cancer
• healthcare team
• treatment recommendation
• decision-making
• content analysis

Acknowledgments

The Regional Cancer Center South is acknowledged for support to the study. The authors would like to acknowledge Nathalie Alexandersson for help with construction of the questionnaire and the MDTM participants for providing data to the study.

Author Contributions

All authors contributed to data analysis, drafting and revising the article, gave final approval of the version to be published, and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Disclosure

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was obtained from the Region Skåne.