Accelerating Development of Cancer Family Caregiver Support - 53 million U.S. family caregivers provide critical daily unpaid assistance to individuals with chronic and/or life-limiting illnesses, 3.3 million of whom provide care to patients with cancer. Despite providing complex care, these cancer caregivers receive little to no support or training. While there has been a high standard and increasing success in testing interventions to support cancer family caregivers over the past two decades, less rigor and thoughtfulness have been given to developing implementation strategies to integrate these interventions into “real world” practice. Translation of evidence-based caregiver interventions to “real world” practice faces considerable challenges, including: lack of intervention testing in “real-world” delivery settings, lack of trained staff, limited outcome data on costs and healthcare utilization, limited funding sources for translation, limitations in provider knowledge, limited understanding of reimbursement and payment, and mechanisms to support caregiver programs. Based on our own national survey data of U.S. cancer centers, this has resulted in the near non-existence of evidence-based formal support services for cancer caregivers. To address this gap, the overall objective of this R25 project is to test a comprehensive national accelerator program, called INCITE (INcreasing Caregiver support Implementation through Training and Education), to train cancer centers and their staff in identifying, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining evidence-based cancer caregiver programs. The INCITE program is designed to work with health systems’ existing cancer center service lines and departments to develop new caregiver services. This is accomplished by providing implementation training, education, coaching, and technical assistance on: selecting, planning, and tailoring evidence-based cancer caregiver interventions for implementation into specific practices; start-up and launch processes; day-to-day operations and workflow; billing and business model planning, and long-term sustainability. Aim 1 will finalize and establish the INCITE program in partnership with experts and constituents from leading caregiver organizations. Aim 2 will test the INCITE Program in the form of two national traineeships/year to competitively selected interdisciplinary teams at U.S. cancer centers that will include pre-preparation learning activities, a 3-day in-person workshop, and post-workshop monthly virtual technical assistance for 6 months. Aim 3 will evaluate the impact of the INCITE Program by measuring a) program outcomes and b) cancer center team outcomes, including family caregiver programmatic development, at their institutions. Aim 4 will disseminate research products through interprofessional conferences, submission of peer-reviewed manuscripts related to program outcomes, and a website hub highlighting program achievements. This high impact project is expected to exponentially increase the presence of evidence-based cancer caregiver interventions and caregiver-focused support programs in U.S. cancer centers.
