‘My journey is to help somebody else’: a qualitative assessment of peer-to-peer gynecologic cancer mentorship during COVID-19

Abstract

<h3>Objectives:</h3> The Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance's Woman to Woman (W2W) program is a peer mentorship program for women with gynecological cancer that was founded in 2004 and has since expanded to over 40 sites nationwide. An initial program survey was conducted in 2013, but no qualitative studies have investigated patient experiences with peer support programs for gynecologic cancer in the United States. <h3>Methods:</h3> This qualitative study investigated perspectives of both mentor and mentee participants in a W2W program at an academic medical center in the Midwest. Semi-structured interviews averaging 54 minutes were conducted, recorded and transcribed verbatim. Interviews focused on understanding how the relationship was built and the benefits and challenges of giving and receiving peer support. Qualitative inductive analysis of 236 pages of transcripts was conducted and managed with NVivo 12. All authors open-coded a subset of interviews that informed codebook development. This codebook was used to code the remainder of the interviews, with one primary coder and a secondary coder reviewing. <h3>Results:</h3> Seven mentors and nine mentees were interviewed (N=16). Thirteen were non-Hispanic White and three were African-American. Participants in both groups were in varying stages of active treatment, remission, and recurrence. Mentors and mentees communicated over several mediums including Facebook, emailing, texting, or calling. Many reported disappointment over not being able to meet in person due to COVID-19. There was occasional misalignment in mentor and mentee expectations for frequency and intensity of communication. Interestingly, it was more often the mentor who expected more contact. While some mentees did express a desire for mentor concordance (e.g. marital status, parenthood, recurrence status), compatibility of mentor-mentee pairs in our study was positive for pairs even when they were not concordant across all demographics. Compatibility issues arose when participants felt like there was a discordance in coping styles between them and their mentor or mentee. While mentees reported receiving other sources of support, having a mentor who had ‘been in the trenches' was uniquely important, especially when COVID-19 restrictions prevented their families from accompanying them to treatments. Mentors reported numerous psychological benefits of being a mentor including feeling needed after retirement, fulfilling a promise to themselves, and giving hope to others. <h3>Conclusions:</h3> Participants reported benefits of giving and receiving peer mentorship for gynecologic cancer. Mentees accessed valuable insider information and mentors found purpose in their own cancer experiences. Assessing mentees' needs, including preferred modality and frequency of communication, and considering demographic concordance prior to matching is crucial to ensuring a successful match. Future iterations of the program should focus on training mentors to interact with mentees through multiple communication platforms, as well as to address additional mentee vulnerabilities introduced by the pandemic.