Impact of Psychosocial and Palliative Care Training on Nurses’ Competences and Care of Patients With Cancer in Cameroon: Protocol for Quasi-Experimental Study
Bibliographic record
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: This study describes a protocol for the development, implementation, and evaluation of a psychosocial oncology and palliative care course on Cameroonian practicing nurses' knowledge, self-perceived competence, and confidence in palliative and psychosocial oncology care provision for patients with cancer. METHODS: A single group pre-posttest design, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used. First, a psychosocial oncology and palliative care course for practicing nurses in Cameroon will be developed. This course will then be implemented with 50 practicing nurses purposefully selected from 2 oncology units in the Littoral region and 4 hospitals in the Southwest region of Cameroon. Finally, to assess the impact of the training program we will undertake a pre and posttest 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 interview of nurses' transfer of learning to practice. Descriptive and inferential statistics will be used to analysis quantitative data, while qualitative data will be analyzed 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 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. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/64871.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.043 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".