Experience implementing the serious illness care program through virtual training of multidisciplinary teams at a regional cancer centre.

Purpose: The Serious Illness Care Program (SICP) was launched at the Juravinski Cancer Centre (JCC) to promote early, high-quality goals of care conversations with patients experiencing advanced cancer. Training was provided to multidisciplinary disease site teams (DSTs). The objective of this study is to validate the virtual SICP training format and assess the clinician and patient experience after 6 months of implementation.

Methods: Clinicians completed SICP training through a virtual workshop on Zoom and responded to surveys describing their experience before and after the training. Clinicians then completed a validated survey 6 months later, describing their experience of implementing serious illness conversations (SIC) into practice. Consenting patients were contacted within 2 weeks of a SIC encounter and responded to validated questions about their experience.

Results: Training was provided to 52 healthcare providers in the breast, lung and brain malignancy DSTs. Overall, the virtual training format was well received. Training could be improved by allowing more time to practice skills and including more video examples. By 6 months, 39% of clinicians reported conducting SIC. Most users reported that SIC helps them understand patient goals. Among non-users, insufficient time was the most cited barrier. Nurses in a non-primary care model reported difficulty engaging in SIC. Most patients felt that SIC was a worthwhile experience.

Conclusion: Our study demonstrates the feasibility of the virtual SICP implementation process. Additionally, SICP was successfully delivered across multidisciplinary DSTs. Training will continue rolling out incrementally for all DSTs at the JCC, exploring the incorporation of self-learning modules.