Delta-Clinician
We're developing resources for healthcare professionals to handle complex discussions with families.
Delta-Clinician is part of a larger study around supporting healthcare professionals navigate the complexities of communicating with children with a hard-to-treat cancer diagnoses and their families.
Delta-Clinician focused on developing a new educational resource for healthcare professionals to facilitate communication between healthcare professionals, families and patients.
What did this study aim to achieve?
We aimed to identify healthcare professionals' key challenges and skills required when communicating with families about hard-to-treat cancers, and their perceptions of communication-related training.
What did this study find?
Healthcare professionals identified several challenges in communicating with families including:
- Balancing information provision while maintaining realistic hope
- Managing their own uncertainty
- Nurses and social workers being underutilised during conversations with families
Making themselves available to families, empowering them to ask questions, and repeating information helped to establish and maintain trusting relationships with families.
Resources are needed that support healthcare professionals to communicate with families of children with hard-to-treat cancers. Such resources may be particularly beneficial for junior oncologists and other healthcare professionals during their training, and should aim to prepare them for common challenges, and to foster greater multidisciplinary collaboration.
You can read more about this study and our findings here.
Our video resource for healthcare professionals
As a first step towards designing resources and training for healthcare professionals, our team has developed an animation that aims to help educate early-career healthcare professionals on communicating with families and children affected by hard-to-treat cancers.
The video script uses quotes from interviews with healthcare professionals around their experiences of and advice around communication with these patients and their families.
How is this study supported?
Delta-Clinician is funded by the Cancer Institute NSW.
Additional information
Please contact Dr Holly Evans if you have any questions about the study.