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FEATURE
Right Diagnosis The San Integrated Cancer Centre’s state of the art ‘war room’ has been completed as part of the Sydney Adventist Hospital redevelopment. Text:/ Christopher Holder
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he San’s Integrated Cancer Centre ‘war room’ has been purpose built for multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings, where clinicians meet and discuss cancer patients’ cases. Each meeting is focused on a certain cancer or tumor stream and normally lasts an hour. Often an MDT meeting will work through some 20 cases in that time with clinicians both in the room or remotely via video-conference. It’s a punishing schedule where lives are at stake. CRISIS TALKS
Formerly, the MDT meetings were held in boardroom-style rooms with a couple of screens at the front. There was a lot of messing around passing computer keyboards around, or trying (often vainly) to connect a device. If someone was late to the meeting, it’d disturb proceedings… everyone knew it was a less than satisfactory situation but no one had the time or the
opportunity to think of a better way. That was until the new Integrated Cancer Centre was being planned. Barbara Mackenzie is head of IT operations (officially her title is: Manager, Information Services Operations and Infrastructure Group at Adventist HealthCare) and had a sense that these MDT meetings were special and needed special design attention. Roneel Singh is an AV/IT consultant with WSP (officially his title is: Technical Director — Head of Technology Systems (ANZ) at WSP) and was engaged to consider this knotty problem, after all, what we’re talking about isn’t a boardroom, or a video conference room or a teaching space, even if there are elements of all three. Barbara describes the break through: “I think the lightbulb moment came when Roneel said: ‘you’re describing a crisis management centre’. That then opened up the thinking, and gave the architect a fresh sense of
what the space should be.” With the big initial breakthrough made, the hard work lay ahead: Barbara, Roneel and his team embarked on a long consultation process to intimately understand the running of an MDT meeting. As Barbara puts it: “What’s different about what we’ve done is to look at the process the clinicians go through and work out how we can better provide technology to support it. Our MDT room is a culmination of everything we’ve learnt.” AV ANATOMY LESSON
There were some key learnings that provided a framework for the MDT room’s AV: • Although there may be no more than a dozen or so doctors and specialists contributing to most MDT meetings, the space needed to cater to up to 40 people — mostly observers, such as students, but also additional contributors in the instance of complex cases.