More Is Needed to Connect Clinicians, Patients to Clinical Trials

Opinion
Video

More facilitation is needed to ensure that clinicians can connect patients with breast cancer to clinical trials they may be eligible for.

More needs to be done to facilitate a connection between oncology nurse navigators and clinical resources to improve enrollment and diversify the patient population involved in research, explained Sue Friedman.

In an interview with CURE®, Friedman, who is the executive director of FORCE (Facing Hereditary Cancer Empowered) discussed a needs assessment conducted by FORCE and supported by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which highlighted barriers for referrals to supportive care services and clinical trials for young patients with breast cancer.

READ MORE: ‘Knowledge is Power’: Advocating for More Representation in Cancer-Related Clinical Trials

Now, Friedman explained, FORCE will work to facilitate that collaboration to improve clinical trial enrollment and break down barriers to supportive care, such as fertility preservation.

Transcript

Well, there were several big takeaways from our needs assessment, and this poster was really just one component of it, but one was that there was more that we could do as an organization to facilitate connecting oncology nurse navigators with resources around clinical research studies to help encourage them to let patients know more about clinical research studies in order to improve enrollment and diverse involvement in clinical research.


For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

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For patients with cancer, the ongoing chemotherapy shortage may cause some anxiety as they wonder how they will receive their drugs. However, measuring drugs “down to the minutiae of the milligrams” helped patients receive the drugs they needed, said Alison Tray. Tray is an advanced oncology certified nurse practitioner and current vice president of ambulatory operations at Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey. If patients are concerned about getting their cancer drugs, Tray noted that having “an open conversation” between patients and providers is key. “As a provider and a nurse myself, having that conversation, that reassurance and sharing the information is a two-way conversation,” she said. “So just knowing that we're taking care of you, we're going to make sure that you receive the care that you need is the key takeaway.” In June 2023, many patients were unable to receive certain chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin and cisplatin because of an ongoing shortage. By October 2023, experts saw an improvement, although the “ongoing crisis” remained. READ MORE: Patients With Lung Cancer Face Unmet Needs During Drug Shortages “We’re really proud of the work that we could do and achieve that through a critical drug shortage,” Tray said. “None of our patients missed a dose of chemotherapy and we were able to provide that for them.” Tray sat down with CURE® during the 49th Annual Oncology Nursing Society Annual Congress to discuss the ongoing chemo shortage and how patients and care teams approached these challenges. Transcript: Particularly at Hartford HealthCare, when we established this infrastructure, our goal was to make sure that every patient would get the treatment that they need and require, utilizing the data that we have from ASCO guidelines to ensure that we're getting the optimal high-quality standard of care in a timely fashion that we didn't have to delay therapies. So, we were able to do that by going down to the minutiae of the milligrams on hand, particularly when we had a lot of critical drug shortages. So it was really creating that process to really ensure that every patient would get the treatment that they needed. For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.
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