Impact of a Training Program on Oncology Nurses’ Confidence in the Provision of Self-Management Support and 5As Behavioral Counseling Skills

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Cancer patients and their families require support to effectively self-manage the medical, emotional, and lifestyle consequences of cancer. In this paper, we describe a training program that showed improvement in oncology nurses confidence in the microskills required for the provision of self-management support to patients for application in routine care and in roles as cancer coaches before and after training at three cancer centres in Ontario, Canada. Self-management support is lacking in cancer care and little attention has been focused on the required preparation of nurses to provide self-management support and behavior change counseling. Our training program may have potential for improving nurses’ provision of self-management support, however, further testing in a larger population of nurses is required to assess effects on nurses skills and its impact on patient uptake of self-management behaviors and health outcomes. ABSTRACT: Background: Cancer patients and their families play a central role in the self-management of the medical, emotional, and lifestyle consequences of cancer. Nurses with training in self-management support can enable cancer patients to better manage the effects of cancer and treatment. Methods: As part of a randomized controlled trial, we developed a training program to build nurses’ confidence in the provision of self-management support (SMS). The SMS skills taught were adapted from the Stanford Peer Support training programs and embedded within the 5As (Assess, Advise, Agree, Assist, and Arrange) behavioral counseling process. We evaluated the impact of the training program on oncology nurses’ and coaches’ confidence using a Student’s t-test for paired samples in a nonrandomized, one-group pre/postsurvey. Results: Participants were experienced oncology nurses from three participating cancer centers. A two-tailed Student’s t-test for paired samples showed a significant improvement in nurses’ confidence for the 15 SMS microskills targeted in the training between the pretest and post-test as follows: for Center 1, a mean difference of 0.79 (t = 7.18, p ≤ 0.00001); for Center 2, a mean difference of 0.73 (t = 8.4, p ≤ 0.00001); for Center 3, a mean difference of 1.57 (t = 11.45, p ≤ 0.00001); and for coaches, a mean difference of 0.52 (t = 7.6, p ≤ 0.00001). Conclusions: Our training program improved oncology staff nurses’ and cancer coaches’ confidence in 15 SMS microskills and has potential for SMS training of nurses in routine care.