Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy Training Program for Cancer Care Clinicians

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Project Summary/Abstract The overall objective of this project, entitled “Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy Training for Cancer Care Providers” (MCPT), is to continue facilitate the implementation and dissemination of Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy (MCP), a Research-Tested Intervention Program (RTIP) through a multi-modal training program for cancer care clinicians. There is extensive evidence demonstrating a need for interventions targeting depression, hopelessness, loss of meaning and spiritual and existential distress in patients coping with the challenges of advanced cancer. To address this need, Breitbart and colleagues developed MCP as an innovative and novel intervention to enhance meaning and reduce despair in advanced cancer patients living in the face of death. Since our National Institute of Health (NIH) R25 grant was funded, we have successfully developed MCPT and trained 297 clinicians from a wide variety of clinical institutions and settings. As proposed, we utilized the RE-AIM framework, comprised of five distinct factors: 1) Reach, 2) Efficacy, 3) Adoption, 4) Implementation, and 5) Maintenance, to evaluate the impact of the MCPT program on the translation of MCP into clinical practice. Preliminary results indicate that trainees are extremely satisfied with the MCPT program, have become proficient in the delivery of MCP, have successfully implemented MCP in their own clinical settings, and are maintaining or improving their MCP skills post-training. We are applying for a 5-year renewal of this R25 grant to capitalize on overwhelming interest expressed by cancer care clinicians in our innovative, immersive training and to further disseminate MCP to advanced cancer patients in need of evidence-based psychosocial care. We will offer this training to an additional 336 clinicians during years 6-10 and enhance the follow-up components of the training to further improve MCP skill maintenance, adoption, and implementation in clinical practice. This will also enable us to continue to collect data on the implementation of MCP with patients in the “real world” across diverse clinical settings. The long-term goal of this project is to disseminate MCP to a wide variety of cancer and palliative care treatment settings through the training of a large, diverse cadre of clinicians. Thus, the specific aims of this study are to: Aim 1: Provide and further develop a training program in MCP for cancer care clinicians from multiple disciplines who provide psycho-oncology and psychosocial palliative care services for cancer patients; Aim 2: Evaluate trainees’ MCP skill acquisition through facilitators’ ratings of MCPT participants and participants’ satisfaction with the program and adoption, implementation, and maintenance of skills; and Aim 3: Evaluate the impact of enhanced follow-up training and engagement in MCP community activities on MCP implementation and skill maintenance.