USE OF INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE ONCOLOGY PATIENT EDUCATION

ABSTRACT

Patient Education and Safety Pre-chemotherapy education sessions for breast cancer patients is a core element of care provided by clinic nurses to patients starting chemotherapy. This is a time intensive session, which outlines symptom management and home care needs. The goal of these sessions is to improve patient outcomes by empowering them to be an active participant in their care. Though a meaningful intervention, clinic nurses spend about 30 hours per month educating first time chemotherapy patients, which has hindered their ability to complete other pressing tasks. Given current staffing challenges and restrictions to visitation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses and advanced practice providers (APPs) sought a novel approach to meet this need to ensure adequate patient education while improving nursing efficiency through the usage of a virtual platform. The purpose was to implement a virtual group chemotherapy teaching session for new breast cancer patients to improve the efficiency and workload for ambulatory nurses while providing a community network for patients. Clinic nurses conduct virtual chemotherapy education sessions weekly for all new patients. This allows patients the opportunity to learn and connect with other patients going through the same or similar treatment. The educational sessions are to be held Zoom and patients access through a link sent to the patient portal. Patients are provided an education packet prior to the virtual session. These sessions can also be utilized by other patients to refresh their knowledge or gain additional nursing support. In-person teaching will still be continued for those who prefer it. Following each session, patients will be given a survey to complete. Evaluation of effectiveness in teaching will be performed utilizing the teach-back method at their first session. Both staff and patient feedback is being evaluated to assess for satisfaction with the new process. With this process, we will save 22 hours per month of nursing time. This will also allow for increased family involvement while following COVID guidelines. Preliminary results suggest an improvement in both patient and nursing satisfaction. Utilizing a virtual format makes for improvement in both efficiency and workload for clinic nurses. In addition, this format of teaching is convenient for both patients and their families. Once this process is fully operational, we are looking at expanding this program within our care centers to hopefully produce the same results.