Dr Tayana Soukup, BSc, MSc, PhD. A psychologist by training, Dr Soukup has completed an NIHR-funded PhD at Imperial College London focused exclusively on cancer multidisciplinary team (MDT) functioning, has worked extensively in the field, and has published numerous papers on evaluating and improving MDTs. Dr Soukup’s expertise includes evaluations of MDTs in real-time, video-based team analytic methods, psychometric development of tools for MDTs, team-based quality-improvements, mixed methodology and implementation science.
Dr Soukup has a longstanding experience of studying MDTs, delivering MDT improvement, and training MDT members, in the UK and overseas, which has been well received and given excellent feedback. Together with her team, Dr Soukup has scientifically studied the workings of cancer MDTs, and has built an extensive evidence-base – with evidence on the factors that promote and those that hinder teams to review patients holistically within a meeting and make implementable and suitable for the patient care recommendations. Dr Soukup has also with her team developed evidence-based tools for the assessment and improvement of the performance of MDTs. These can be used by clinicians, administrators or researchers to gain a reliable and valid understanding of how their MDTs are performing and can be used as part of audit or quality improvement initiatives to improve the delivery of care for patients. They can be applied at different points along the MDT pathway: for pre-MDT meeting case selection; for intra-MDT meeting streamlining; and for team reflection, assessment and team building.