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Brief description/objective

Disease-specific profiles of decision-making processes at multidisciplinary team conferences


Background:
The core of multidisciplinary taeam conferences (MTC) is a decision-making process depending on interaction of MTC participants. Best use of leadership and teamwork in MTC influences the decision-making process and the output quality of a MTC.

While growing evidence shows the crucial role of leadership and teamwork for clinical outcomes in several areas of medicine, however, it is not known what kind or profiles of leadership and teamwork is used and needed in different, disease-specific types of MTCs. It is likely that a more “diagnostic” MTC like leukemia MTC needs another kind of leadership and teamwork than a more “therapeutic” MTC like a postoperative breast cancer MTC. Identifying differentiated forms would profoundly refine our understanding of the nature of leadership and teamwork in MTCs, contribute to a better understanding of the crucial factors of successful collaboration in MTC and would allow building a base for recommendations about MTCs in the present political discussion for highly specialized medicine in Switzerland (“IVHSM”).

Hypothesis:
We hypothesize that different profiles of MTC are characteristic to disease-specific issues.

Aims:
Define several profiles of disease specific MTCs according to organizational structure, team-working, leadership and patient-centeredness in the 12 MTC at the Kantonsspital St.Gallen.

It is planned to validate the findings of this study in other Swiss hospitals within a larger successor trial.