Breaking Bad News Within the Oncology Setting

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Breaking Bad News: Do teaching sessions or experience impact on an oncologist's ability to break bad news to a patient or their family? - A single centre experience.

• IRAS ID

  187021

• Contact name

  Catherine Haines

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Nottingham

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 5 months, 20 days

• Research summary

  In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift towards highlighting the importance of good communication skills at an undergraduate and postgraduate medical level. As a result, recent trainee doctors undertake regular communication skills training. This study aims to focus on breaking bad news within the oncology setting, an area where clinicians regularly have to communicate devastating news. The study will take place at a single centre, Nottingham City Hospital. Here, we will focus on doctors at various stages of training and explore whether they had formal communication skills teaching and, if so, what effect they believe this teaching had on their own abilities to communicate bad news. It will also highlight, if the same clinicians feel the ability to break bad news is not something that they can be taught but more something that they have learnt through experience or even something that is innate.

  Alongside this, the study will also hear from oncology nursing staff. They will act as impartial, third party observers who will discuss what attributes and methods employed make a physician good at breaking bad news.

  Each participant will be involved in one focus group session lasting approximately 60 minutes. Here their anonymous responses will be recorded for further analysis.

  The importance of this study is that it is important to identify whether physicians and their nursing colleagues feel that formal communication skills teaching they are or have received actually makes a difference to their abilities to break bad news as this could impact on the frequency and/or use of communication skills teaching.

• REC name

  N/A

• REC reference

  N/A