Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Jun 3, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 17, 2025 - Aug 12, 2025
Date Accepted: Aug 15, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Training gaps in digital skills for cancer healthcare workforce: insights from clinical, non-clinical professionals, and patients/caregivers
ABSTRACT
Background:
The integration of digital technologies is becoming increasingly essential in cancer care. However, limited digital health literacy (DHL) among clinical and non-clinical cancer healthcare professionals poses significant challenges to effective implementation and sustainability over time. To address this, the European Union is prioritizing the development of targeted digital skills training programs for cancer care providers. A crucial initial step in this effort is conducting a comprehensive gap analysis to identify specific training needs.
Objective:
The aim of this work is to identify training gaps and prioritize the digital skill development needs in the oncology healthcare workforce.
Methods:
An Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) was conducted. The survey assessed the performance and importance of seven digital skills: Information, Communication, Content Creation, Safety, e-Health Problem Solving, Ethics, and Patient Empowerment.
Results:
A total of 67 participants from 11 European countries completed the study: 38 clinical professionals (CP), 16 non-clinical professionals (NCP), and 13 patients/caregivers (PC). CP acknowledged the need for a comprehensive training program, that includes all the seven digital skills. Digital Patient Empowerment and Safety skills emerge as the highest priorities for both CP and NCP. Conversely, NCP assigned lower priority to digital Content Creation skills and PC to digital Information and Ethical skills. The IPA also revealed discrepancies in digital Communication skills across groups (H = 6.50; p<.05).
Conclusions:
The study showcased the pressing need for comprehensive digital skill training for cancer healthcare professionals across diverse backgrounds and healthcare systems in Europe. Based on the results the most urgent areas of digital skills training include digital Patient Empowerment and Safety skills. Incorporating patient and caregiver perspectives ensures a balanced approach to addressing these training gaps. These findings provide a valuable knowledge base for designing digital skills training programs, promoting a holistic approach that integrates the perspectives of the various stakeholders involved in digital cancer care.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.