A Presurgery Hypnosis Training Program for Nurse Anesthetists

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Surgery is an essential part of all current treatments to cure breast cancer. The vast majority of women will experience highly aversive side effects following breast conserving surgery, including pain, nausea, and fatigue. The negative consequences of these side effects of surgical treatment are reflected in multiple public health domains including the suffering these women endure, as well as the financial costs borne by medical institutions and thereby society at large. To address this important clinical and public health problem, we developed and established the effectiveness of a brief, presurgery, psychologist-administered hypnosis intervention for breast cancer patients. This intervention significantly reduced pain, nausea and fatigue in a sample of 200 breast cancer surgical patients, and additionally resulted in a cost savings to the institution of $727 per patient. This indicates that If presurgery hypnosis were routinely used with all breast cancer surgical patients on a national basis, over $140 million health care dollars would be saved each year. Unfortunately, the track record of empirically-supported behavioral medicine interventions making the jump from research protocol to standard clinical care is abysmal. Common reasons given for the failure of the translation of new interventions are the unavailability of trained personnel and cost. To promote the routine use of presurgery hypnosis to improve patient care, we plan to implement and evaluate a new training program. Specifically, consistent with the R25E program announcement, we plan to train nurse anesthetists in our evidence-based approach to symptom and side effect control, namely in our hypnosis intervention. Collecting cost-effectiveness data is an important part of the design, as such data are key to promoting the continuation of the training program beyond conclusion of the funding period, and as such data will provide empirical evidence to decision makers. Furthermore we will train nurses in both academic and public hospitals, as too often advances at academic settings do not translate to the community. Program evaluation will focus on three levels: nurses' learning of the training material, their performance of the hypnosis intervention, and the effectiveness of the nurse anesthetist-administered hypnosis intervention in reducing institutional costs and patients' postsurgery side effects (assessed using a randomized clinical trial design). Aim 1: To develop and implement a training program in presurgery hypnosis for nurse anesthetists. Aim 2: To examine the effectiveness of the presurgery hypnosis training program from the perspective of end-users (patients). Aim 3: To investigate the relative effectiveness of the hypnosis training program from the perspective of the institution (hospitals).