Using Patient Centered Care Approaches to Enhance Participation in Cancer Clinical Trials

Adult participation in cancer clinical trials (CCTs) remains low at a rate of less than 3%. Trial staff often face challenges in effectively identifying, screening, enrolling and retaining patients for studies. Many struggle with how to achieve this most effectively, particularly when facing both patient-related barriers (e.g. fear, lack of knowledge, costs, language barriers) as well as institutional obstacles (e.g. lack of oncologist buy-in to introduce trials to eligible patients, limited staff resources for outreach and language access services). In 2010, ENACCT launched a training initiative to address these challenges with 6 Community Clinical Oncology Programs (CCOPs) nationwide. The training curriculum, Enhancing Cancer Clinical Trial Participation:A Patient Centered Approach emphasized implementation of tailored, patient-focused recruitment and retention practices, highlighting 5 key steps to patient trial participation with practical strategies and resources to successfully accomplish each step. Training activities, including case studies, role-plays and action-planning, enabled CCOP staff to identify effective approaches for engaging community providers and the public about trials, enrolling low literacy and Limited English Proficient patients, and discussing difficult questions patients may have during the consent process. Training evaluation measures included pre and post test questionnaires and completion of an online follow-up survey 3 months post training. ENACCT trained a total of 158 participants. Post training, all sites demonstrated improvement in knowledge and increased intention to make changes regarding cancer clinical trial recruitment and retention practices. This presentation will provide an overview of the training content, share outcome data, identify lessons learned from implementation and discuss future directions.