Common Language, Trainee Involvement Enhances New Peritoneal Metastases Guidelines

Being able to speak about high-level concepts and medical issues in a singular, common language is crucial, not only for already established experts, but also for trainees. This is one issue that recently published guidelines for peritoneal surface malignancy care hoped to tackle.

Following the publication of this update in guidelines, CancerNetwork® spoke with Kiran Turaga, MD, MPH, about how they may alter the way that the training of oncologists in this field will occur. Uniting behind a common terminology, according to Turaga, is the “most important thing we can do for our trainees.”

Furthermore, the undertaking to create these new guidelines was largely led by the trainees. They were the ones who worked with the experts and wrote the manuscript. Due to this, the experts were able to conduct a needs assessment to understand what the trainees need to learn. This information was used to create a curriculum that can be used to better understand the proper methods of care.

Turaga is a professor of surgical oncology, assistant medical director of the Clinical Trials Office, division chief of Surgical Oncology and Surgery at Yale Cancer Center, and was the research lead for this undertaking.

Transcript:

The first thing is that using a common terminology, using the same language, and talking in the same way about patients is perhaps the most important thing we can do for trainees. The richness of these papers is that they show areas where there is discordance, people disagree, or there’s controversy, but they also show areas where there’s significant alignment and consensus around how patients should be managed. That’s the most important thing we can do for our trainees, where they have very clear, precise pathways, but also an awareness of the limitations of these pathways. That’s what this does.

The key [aspect] in this consensus, which was unique, was that this effort was led by our trainees. The trainees were the glue that would then work with a lot of the experts in the field, bring this together, and write the manuscript. You’ll notice that the papers are all written by our trainee authors who are expanded out, but the actual group is the consortium group, which is the last author. They’re the experts who have done all the work, so when the trainees have written these papers, they’ve written them from their perspective as well. It is something where this is written by the trainees, for the trainees, and, of course, for all the other clinicians who take care of patients. We also had a parallel effort where we built a curriculum, and we did a needs assessment. We saw what trainees need from this curriculum, like how much time they were willing to spend, what they need to learn, and how they should learn it. There are bite-sized pieces of information that are accessible on their phones. Digital media is something that we were able to develop in parallel with this, as well.

Reference

Butensky SD, Bansal VV, Su DG, et al. Consensus guideline for the management of gastric cancer with synchronous peritoneal metastases. Ann Surg Oncol. Published online June 25, 2025. doi:10.1245/s10434-025-17361-2