• Fabio Tirotta, James Hodson, Des Alcorn, Ahmed Al-Mukhtar, Gareth Ayre, Adam Barlow, Peter Chong, Thomas Cosker, Palma Dileo, Rodrigo Figueiredo, Jeremy French, Aziz Gulamhusein, Robert Jones, Andrew Hayes, Catherine Key, Hassan Malik, Ahmed Mahrous, Radu Mihai, Ioanna Nixon, Karen Partington, Martha Quinn, James Roberts, Raza Sayyed, Arjun Shankar, Dirk Strauss, Paul Turner, and Anant Desai.
• Department of Sarcoma and General Surgery, Midlands Abdominal and Retroperitoneal Sarcoma Unit, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham, UK.
• Br J Surg. 2023 Aug 11; 110 (9): 118911961189-1196.

BackgroundDecision-making in the management of patients with retroperitoneal sarcoma is complex and requires input from a number of different specialists. The aim of this study was to evaluate the levels of agreement in terms of resectability, treatment allocation, and organs proposed to be resected across different retroperitoneal sarcoma multidisciplinary team meetings.MethodsThe CT scans and clinical information of 21 anonymized retroperitoneal sarcoma patients were sent to all of the retroperitoneal sarcoma multidisciplinary team meetings in Great Britain, which were asked to give an opinion about resectability, treatment allocation, and organs proposed to be resected. The main outcome was inter-centre reliability, which was quantified using overall agreement, as well as the chance-corrected Krippendorff's alpha statistic. Based on the latter, the level of agreement was classified as: 'slight' (0.00-0.20), 'fair' (0.21-0.40), 'moderate' (0.41-0.60), 'substantial' (0.61-0.80), or 'near-perfect' (>0.80).ResultsTwenty-one patients were reviewed at 12 retroperitoneal sarcoma multidisciplinary team meetings, giving a total of 252 assessments for analysis. Consistency between centres was only 'slight' to 'fair', with rates of overall agreement and Krippendorff's alpha statistics of 85.4 per cent (211 of 247) and 0.37 (95 per cent c.i. 0.11 to 0.57) for resectability; 80.4 per cent (201 of 250) and 0.39 (95 per cent c.i. 0.33 to 0.45) for treatment allocation; and 53.0 per cent (131 of 247) and 0.20 (95 per cent c.i. 0.17 to 0.23) for the organs proposed to be resected. Depending on the centre that they had attended, 12 of 21 patients could either have been deemed resectable or unresectable, and 10 of 21 could have received either potentially curative or palliative treatment.ConclusionsInter-centre agreement between retroperitoneal sarcoma multidisciplinary team meetings was low. Multidisciplinary team meetings may not provide the same standard of care for patients with retroperitoneal sarcoma across Great Britain.© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of BJS Society Ltd. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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