Background : A draft of best practice guidelines by Cancer Council, Victoria, Australia recommended initiating treatment no more than four weeks from the time of initial consultation for thoracic malignancies. The implementation of a lung cancer multidisciplinary team meeting in 2006, which aims to expedite treatment time and optimise management for patients with this condition. Optimally all patients with a suspected or confirmed thoracic malignancy should be expediently referred for discussion at the multidisciplanry team meeting before treatment commences . Hitherto the extent to which the management recieved by these patients concurs with vitorian lung cancer guidelines, is unknown.

Methods : Available meeting minutes of the lung cancer multidisciplinary meeting will be reviewed to collect retrospectively clinical data on 100 consecutive cases discussed and all patients with a suspected or confirmed lung cancer. Relevant details including patient and tumour characteristics, treatment recommendation, time to treatment initiation from time of multidisciplinary meeting discussion, reason for initiating treatment more than four weeks since discussion, and reason for, if any, discordance between consensus recommendation and actual treatment implemented will be collected for analysis.
The data collected is entered into an excel spreadsheet stored in a secured hospital-based hard-drive accessible only to staff involved in this project. Patients will not be contacted. All findings from this project will be presented in de-identified form using descriptive data only

Results: will be reported at meeting

Conclusions: will be reported at meeting