Abstract
BackgroundThere is widespread agreement about the importance of communication skills training (CST) for healthcare professionals caring for cancer patients. Communication can be effectively learned and improved through specific CST. Existing CSTs have some limitations with regard to transferring the learning to the workplace. The aim of the study is developing, piloting, and preliminarily assessing a CST programme for hospital physicians caring for advanced cancer patients to improve communication competences.MethodsThis is a Phase 0-I study that follows the Medical Research Council framework; this paper describes the following sections: a literature review on CST, the development of the Teach to Talk training programme (TtT), the development of a procedure for assessing the quality of the implementation process and assessing the feasibility of the implementation process, and the pilot programme. The study was performed at a 900-bed public hospital. The programme was implemented by the Specialized Palliative Care Service. The programme was proposed to 19 physicians from 2 departments.ResultsThe different components of the training course were identified, and a set of quality indicators was developed. The TtT programme was implemented; all the physicians attended the lesson, videos, and role-playing sessions. Only 25% of the physicians participated in the bedside training. It was more challenging to involve Haematology physicians in the programme.ConclusionsThe programme was completed as established for one of the two departments in which it was piloted. Thus, in spite of the good feedback from the trainees, a re-piloting of a different training program will be developed, considering in particular the bed side component.The program should be tailored on specific communication attitude and believes, probably different between different specialties.
Highlights
There is widespread agreement about the importance of communication skills training (CST) for healthcare professionals caring for cancer patients
CST are usually implemented by psychologists or experts from psychiatry and behavioural sciences who, de facto, are not directly involved in physicianpatient communications experiential learning techniques usually employed within these training, such as role playing with peers or trained actors, are not real encounters with real patients, which included in only a minority of programmes
Beginning from limitations acknowledged by the literature about existing CST, we developed a novel communication training programme addressed to hospital physicians caring for oncologic patients with palliative care needs, conceived to be implemented inside participants’ workplace, held by specialized palliative care and including encounters with real patients among experiential learning techniques
Summary
There is widespread agreement about the importance of communication skills training (CST) for healthcare professionals caring for cancer patients. Communication can be effectively learned and improved through specific CST. The aim of the study is developing, piloting, and preliminarily assessing a CST programme for hospital physicians caring for advanced cancer patients to improve communication competences. There is widespread agreement on the importance of communication skills training (CST) for healthcare professionals caring for cancer patients [1, 2]. As highlighted in a number of studies, physicianpatient communication can be effectively learned and improved through specific training programmes [2, 9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. CST are usually implemented by psychologists or experts from psychiatry and behavioural sciences who, de facto, are not directly involved in physicianpatient communications experiential learning techniques usually employed within these training, such as role playing with peers or trained actors, are not real encounters with real patients, which included in only a minority of programmes.
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