Moving Forward Together: Enhancing the Oncologist-Palliative Care Clinician Relationship for Comanagement Care Models (SA526)

Abstract

•Reduce the potential for conflict between the oncologist and palliative care clinician around treatment decisions.•Enhance the capacity for empathy for each other as oncology and specialty palliative care clinicians.•Develop strategies for effective relationship building between oncology clinicians and specialty palliative care clinicians. As the evidence base for specialty palliative care integration in oncology grows, and the spectrum of oncology interventions broadens, understanding the perspectives of oncology clinicians becomes increasingly important. Oncology clinicians (medical, nursing and other professionals) often have unique medical and psychosocial perspectives about their practices that influence care delivery to cancer patients and their loved ones. These perspectives often differ from those of specialty palliative care clinicians. For example, oncology clinicians may initiate and/or continue anti-cancer treatment despite marginal patient performance status, due to either new, potentially effective treatments, therapeutic optimism, prognostic uncertainty, and/or other clinician, patient, or disease-related factors. Oncology and palliative care clinicians may also have different concepts of, and approaches to, suffering, especially in the setting of advanced disease. As palliative care continues to integrate upstream in oncology care, palliative care clinicians must learn to foster the oncologist-patient relationship to support both the patient/family and the oncology clinical team. An understanding of these complex medical and relational issues is essential for palliative care specialists to provide optimal consultative, inter-professional and concomitant care for cancer patients and their caregivers. This concurrent session will employ a case-based format interspersed with “fish bowl” role-play to demonstrate the multifaceted perspectives and disparate needs of both the oncology and palliative care clinicians, and how best to support them both. Different iterations of the role-play will illustrate common “pressure points” for both oncology and specialty palliative care clinicians and will demonstrate communication techniques that can benefit cross-specialty and inter-professional team building. Oncology sub-specialties and patient care topics will include medical, radiation and surgical oncology. Interprofessional collaboration will be highlighted and will entail participation in the role-play by medical, nursing and social work professionals.