JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Cancer is a leading cause of global mortality, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020. This is projected to increase by more than 60% by 2040, particularly in low-and middle-income countries. Yet palliative and psychosocial oncology care is very limited in these countries.

Objective:

To describe a protocol for the development, implementation and evaluation of a psychosocial oncology and palliative care course on Cameroonian practising nurses’ knowledge, self-perceived competence and confidence in palliative and psychosocial oncology care provision for cancer patients.

Methods:

A single group pretest/post-test design, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used. First, a psychosocial oncology and palliative care course for practising nurses in Cameroon will be developed. This course will then be implemented with 50 practising nurses purposefully selected from 2 oncology centers in the Littoral region and 4 hospitals in the Southwest region of Cameroon. Lastly, to assess the impact of the training program we will undertake a pre and post-test survey of nurses’ palliative and psychosocial oncology competences, a pre and post training audit of patients’ nursing records to examine nurses’ practice of palliative and psychosocial oncology care and undertake a critical incident interviews of nurses’ transfer of learning to practice. Descriptive and inferential statistics will be used to analysis quantitative data, while qualitative data will be analysed using the framework approach.

Results:

This study was funded in September 2023. The training program development was initiated in March 2024 and completed in June 2024. Baseline data collection was commenced in May 2024 and as of September 2024, we had collected data from 300 patient record. Training implementation is planned for October-December 2024, and post intervention data will be started in October 2024 and continue till April 2025. Data analysis will commence in October 2024 and we aim to publish study findings in peer review journals by November 2025.

Conclusions:

This study will improve our understanding of Cameroonian nurses’ palliative and psychosocial oncology competency gaps. It will result in the development of a palliative care and psychosocial oncology course and in the training of 50 nurses in psychosocial oncology and palliative care in Cameroon. This study will inform strategies for future psychosocial oncology and palliative care training initiatives in Cameroon and other low-and middle-income countries.