Tobacco Treatment Training for Cancer Care Providers

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Project Summary/Abstract This cancer education training project is designed to train oncology care providers to implement tobacco use assessment and treatment (TUAT) in their cancer care settings. Persistent smoking is associated with cancer- specific and all-cause mortality, increased likelihood for second primary cancer, increased risk for disease recurrence, poor response to treatment and treatment-related toxicity. Leading oncology organizations have strongly endorsed tobacco use assessment and treatment as an important metric for high quality cancer care and evidence-based, clinical guidelines exist for assessment and treatment of tobacco use and dependence among cancer patients. Unfortunately, barriers for implementation are many, and adoption of TUAT into real world oncology practice settings remains slow and inconsistent. Although recent surveys demonstrate that oncology providers agree that advising tobacco cessation is an important aspect of cancer treatment planning and that some progress has been made at offering tobacco treatment services as NCI-Designated Cancer Centers, most cancer care settings have not yet established tobacco cessation treatment as standard care, and there exists a lack of training and implementation support needed to achieve TUAT innovation in cancer research and care. To address this continued research-to-practice gap, renewal of this cancer education grant will support refinement and enactment of our current well-received TUAT skills development course and collaborative training program intended to accelerate oncology care providers’ efforts to implement TUAT for tobacco-dependent patients treated in their respective cancer care facilities. Our proposed skills development effort will be enacted during a 6-month period of active training engagement beginning with a 2-day onsite or virtual Workshop followed by six monthly videoconferences (Collaboratory) co-facilitated by Program Faculty with extensive TUAT expertise in cancer. This proposed renewal of this skills development course will enable us to enroll 15 additional cohorts (20 participants/cohort) enabling us to train an additional 300 multidisciplinary participants from diverse cancer practice settings. To date, there has been the strong demand for TTT-O from a large number of oncology care providers from multiple disciplines and a wide variety of cancer care settings. We have exceeded our initial enrollment projects and successfully trained 286 oncology care providers. Participant feedback regarding course content, faculty and format have been outstanding. The findings from our multi-pronged evaluation plan demonstrate statistically significant improvements in TUAT knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy, skills, and behavior. Ultimately, this cancer education program will improve the capacity of oncology care providers to implement clinical practice guidelines for tobacco use assessment and treatment and reduce tobacco-related morbidity and mortality among cancer patients and survivors.