Abstract

Background: Care delivered via multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) is becoming increasingly prevalent in clinical medicine. Medical students are often encouraged to observe MDT meetings to learn about multidisciplinary care; however, this approach presents potential barriers to learning. We describe a novel teaching exercise which engages students in adopting roles in a simulated MDT, with the aim of improving understanding of how MDTs operate to deliver cancer care.

Methods: A simulation exercise was designed which assigned individual students to one of 10 MDT roles. Each student was given specific information about a fictional patient which pertained to their role and asked to collectively discuss management options. Feedback forms were distributed to students to assess self-reported understanding of MDTs and perceived teaching quality of the simulation exercise compared to facilitated observation of a formal MDT meeting.

Results: Sixty-five students participated in both the simulation exercise and the facilitated MDT observation session and provided feedback. Most students (78%) rated the simulation exercise as either ‘good’ (40%) or ‘excellent’ (38%), with a statistically significant improvement in mean score for the role-play compared to facilitated formal MDT observation [mean difference 0.46, P < 0.001, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.23–0.69]. Fifty-three students (82%) reported that participation in the simulation exercise improved their understanding of MDTs.

Conclusions: Multidisciplinary care teaching can be delivered to medical students in an acceptable and effective form using simulation- based training. Potential further developments for simulated MDTs include use of parallel pre- and post-test questions to assess learning and use of anonymised patient data to create authentic vignettes.

Supplementary material

Supplementary file 1. Case 1: information for teaching facilitator, is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10027026.