Aims: Family carers regularly attend cancer consultations and often play an influential role in treatment decision-making. Whilst family involvement is usually considered helpful by oncology clinicians, challenges (e.g. family anger, dominance) can arise which require careful navigation. In collaboration with the McGrath Foundation, we developed on an online education module for McGrath Breast Care nurses, that incorporates our group’s evidence-based TRIO guidelines and professionally produced videos on managing family conflict, anger and dominance in an oncology setting. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness and acceptability of the web-module.
Methods: Participants were specialist McGrath breast care nurses recruited through invitation from the McGrath learning co-ordinators. Pre-module, participants completed online questionnaires on demographics, work experience, attitudes towards family carers and confidence in and knowledge of effective management of complex situations with family carers. Post-module measures were attitudes, confidence and knowledge, as well feedback on the module. Interviews were conducted with a subset of participants to obtain detailed qualitative feedback on the module.
Results: 30 McGrath nurses have completed the study so far, with recruitment to cease in August 2019. Interim results indicate that 83% of participants found the module to be ‘Very Helpful (4/5)’ or ‘Extremely Helpful (5/5)’, and 87% would be ‘Very Likely’ or ‘Extremely Likely’ to recommend it to their colleagues. Participant satisfaction with the usability and the content of the module was high; 93% rated the usability of the module >4/5, and 97% rated the content >4/5. Changes in attitudes, confidence and knowledge, as well as qualitive feedback will also be presented.
Conclusions: This presentation will provide an overview of the online education module’s contents and functionality, describe the results and feedback, and discuss important learnings for future online education of health professionals.