A brief educational intervention to increase communication about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in community oncology settings.
6054 Background: The widespread use of CAM in academic oncology settings has been well documented. However, there is a lack of communication between patients and health care professionals on CAM that may have negative health consequences. No comprehensive study of CAM use in community oncology settings exists. We examined the benefits of a brief educational intervention on nurse discussions of CAM with patients. Methods: A multi-site, randomized trial of an educational intervention (brief video, resource list) designed to encourage oncology nurses to discuss CAM use with their patients was conducted within the MD Anderson CCOP network. Nurses (N=175) and patients (baseline N=699 and different set of patients after intervention N=650) completed questions about CAM use, communication, and knowledge. Results: Nurses were 97% female, 96% non-Hispanic white. Two months after the intervention, nurses in the intervention group reported that they were more likely to ask about CAM use than those in the control group (OR=4.2; p<.005) and asked more of their last 5 patients about CAM use (p=.003). No significant intervention effect was found for the proportion of patients in the clinic who indicated they were asked about CAM use after the intervention (OR=1.6, p>.10). Approximately 40% of patients reported using CAM following their cancer diagnosis yet the majority of nurses estimated less than 25% of their patients used CAM. Conclusions: CAM use in community-based oncology patients is high and there is an underestimation of use by the oncology nurses. This very brief intervention significantly improved how often nurses reported asking patients about their CAM use. However, the patients of the nurses did not reflect this change in communication. Additional types of interventions are needed to increase communication between patients and nurses.