Multidisciplinary collaboration in cancer teams: a realist review of the literature

Background: Multidisciplinary collaboration is an important aspect in providing high quality care in healthcare systems. It is key in the delivery of cost effective health care, positive patient outcomes and enhanced patient and professional satisfaction. The multidisciplinary approach is widely accepted as the “golden standard” of qualitative cancer care delivery. Literature reports a variety of determinants related to effective multidisciplinary collaboration in cancer teams. However, a systematic collection of evidence that addresses the complexity and context of the different determinants of collaboration is urgently needed. This realist review aims to systematically investigate determinants of effective multidisciplinary cancer teams, to synthesize knowledge of the underlying mechanisms and to map contextual factors.
Methods: A realist review is conducted to identify and explain the interaction between context, mechanism and outcome on the determinants of multidisciplinary cancer teams. A realist review aims to answer explanatory questions (the ‘How?’, ‘Why?’, ‘For whom?’, ‘To what extent?’ and ‘In what circumstances?’) and is not a mere synthesis of the literature. We searched in three electronic databases: Web of Sience, Pubmed and Scopus. Inclusion criteria included English written literature on multidisciplinary collaboration in oncology, published between January 2010 and February 2018.
Results: Results will be available by the end of 2018. Preliminary results on the context-mechanism-outcome figurations and theoretical framework will be presented.
Conclusions/implications: Determinants of multidisciplinary collaboration are an important element to develop strategies or interventions to enhance multidisciplinary collaboration in cancer teams. The theory resulting from this review will present a layered model of mechanisms on how multidisciplinary teams contribute to desirable outcomes and which contextual factors appear to be of critical influence.