Patients’ Non-Medical Characteristics Contribute to Collective Medical Decision-Making at Multidisciplinary Oncological Team Meetings

Abstract

The Social Representations approach suggests that patients' non-medical characteristics constitute a kind of tacit professional knowledge that may be frequently mobilised in physicians' everyday professional practice. The links observed between patients' attributes and the medical decisions made at these meetings show that these attributes should be taken into account in order to understand how medical decisions are reached in difficult situations of this kind.