Disseminating evidence-based cancer support interventions through skills-based professional training workshops. — ASN Events
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Disseminating evidence-based cancer support interventions through skills-based professional training workshops. (#222)

William H Redd 1 , Paul Greene 1 , Katherine DuHamel 2 , Karen Clark 3 , Gary Winkel 1 , Marcia Grant 3 , Emily Byrne 1 , Liz Liebman 1 , Matthew Loscalzo 3
  1. Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States
  2. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, United States
  3. City of Hope, Duarte, CA, United States

Aims: Strong scientific evidence supports the use of recently developed cognitive-behavior supportive care interventions to reduce patient pain/distress and improve overall quality of life. Unfortunately, few patients are able to benefit from these interventions because many frontline clinicians do not have the necessary skills to implement these strategies. We are addressing this need through our NIH-funded skill- based workshop series, Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (CBT) across the cancer continuum. This presentation will report our program evaluation of this initiative.

Methods: Each biannual workshop is conducted by a multidisciplinary team of leaders in the field. Forty competitively selected cancer professionals receive readings/treatment manuals before each 3-day skills training workshop. Workshops include lectures, small group exercises, case presentations, role-playing, and supervised practice. During six monthly post-workshop conference calls, faculty lead discussions of assigned readings and barriers to implementation.  An online discussion board facilitates mutual support and faculty consultation.

Results: Four workshops have been conducted with 162 trainees.Faculty lectures and breakout sessions were evaluated on a 5 point scale with 5 being the highest score. For clarity of presentation, the mean score was 4.41. Scores for quality of the content of the presentation averaged 4.40. The trainees rated the presentations as valuable (mean=4.35), while the average rating of their increase in knowledge was 4.15.  Participants’ overall confidence around implementing CBT significantly increased from pre (mean=24.31) to post workshop (mean=26.68), p=.00.

Conclusions: Our interdisciplinary training workshop efforts successfully disseminated evidence-based supportive care interventions to a broad range of cancer professionals. Based on these positive outcomes, we have three NIH applications pending to support training workshops on: maximizing sexual health in patients and survivors, building supportive care programs, and comprehensive bio-psychosocial screening. We will discuss our program evaluation of CBT in the context of our recently developed workshop series initiative.