The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted cancer care worldwide. Disruptions have been seen across all facets of care. While the long-term impact of COVID-19 remains unclear, the immediate impacts on patients, their carers and the healthcare workforce are increasingly evident. This study describes disruptions and reorganisation of cancer services in Australia since the onset of COVID-19, from the perspectives of people affected by cancer and healthcare workers. Two separate online cross-sectional surveys were completed by: a) cancer patients, survivors, carers, family members or friends (n = 852) and b) healthcare workers (n = 150). Descriptive analyses of quantitative survey data were conducted, followed by inductive thematic content analyses of qualitative survey responses relating to cancer care disruption and perceptions of telehealth. Overall, 42% of cancer patients and survivors reported experiencing some level of care disruption. A further 43% of healthcare workers reported atypical delays in delivering cancer care, and 50% agreed that patient access to research and clinical trials had been reduced. Almost three quarters (73%) of patients and carers reported using telehealth following the onset of COVID-19, with high overall satisfaction. However, gaps were identified in provision of psychological support and 20% of participants reported that they were unlikely to use telehealth again. The reorganisation of cancer care increased the psychological and practical burden on carers, with hospital visitation restrictions and appointment changes reducing their ability to provide essential support. COVID-19 has exacerbated a stressful and uncertain time for people affected by cancer and healthcare workers. Service reconfiguration and the adoption of telehealth have been essential adaptations for the pandemic response, offering long-term value. However, our findings highlight the need to better integrate psychosocial support and the important role of carers into evolving pandemic response measures. Learnings from this study could inform service improvements that would benefit patients and carers longer-term.

Background Despite considerable encouragement for healthcare professionals to use or be clear about the theory used in their improvement programmes, the uptake of these approaches to design interventions or report their content is lacking. Recommendations suggest healthcare practitioners work with social and/or behavioural scientists to gain expertise in programme theory, ideally before, but even during or after the work is done. We aim to demonstrate the extent to which intuitive intervention strategies designed by healthcare professionals to overcome patient barriers to communicating genetic cancer risk information to family members align with a theoretical framework of behaviour change. Methods As part of a pre-post intervention study, a team of genetic counsellors aimed to understand, and design interventions to overcome, the major barriers a group of familial cancer patients face around communicating hereditary cancer risk information to their relatives. A behavioural change specialist worked with the team to review and recode barriers and interventions according to the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) and 93 behaviour change techniques (BCTs). Resulting BCTs were cross-referenced against the Theory and Techniques Tool to examine whether evidence-based mechanistic links have been established to date. Results Five themes emerged from the genetic counsellor coded barriers, which when recoded according to the TDF represented seven domains of behaviour change. Forty-five experiential and intuitive interventions were used to tackle key barriers. These were represented by 21 BCTs, which were found to be used on 131 occasions. The full mapping exercise is presented, resulting in a suite of intervention strategies explicitly linked to a theoretical framework. Structured, written reflections were provided retrospectively by the core clinical team. Conclusions Although the ideal is to use theory prospectively, or even whilst a project is underway, making links between theory and interventions explicit, even retrospectively, can contribute towards standardising intervention strategies, furthering understanding of intervention effects, and enhancing the opportunities for accurate replicability and generalisability across other settings. Demonstrating to healthcare professionals how their intuition aligns with theory may highlight the additional benefits that theory has to offer and serve to promote its use in improvement.

Translating evidence into complex health systems is an ongoing challenge. Building the capacity of healthcare workers in behavioral and implementation science methods may facilitate the use of evidence-based implementation approaches, leading to sustainable and effective translation. The aim was to describe the development, contents and evaluation of a training workshop aimed at upskilling hospital-embedded staff to deliver an evidence-based implementation approach. The Hide and Seek Project (HaSP) is a cluster randomized controlled trial testing two implementation approaches for improving hereditary cancer referral at eight Australian hospitals. Healthcare workers were recruited as “Implementation Leads” and trained via a one-day workshop—TRAining in evideNce-baSed ImpLementATion for hEalth (TRANSLATE). The purpose of TRANSLATE was to upskill Implementation Leads in the delivery of HaSP, as well as implementation science methods more broadly. Implementation Leads participated in semi-structured evaluation interviews, which were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Nine Implementation Leads from various professional backgrounds completed the training. Four key themes were identified: (i) training day reactions, (ii) learning, (iii) implementation barriers and facilitators, and (iv) building health system capacity for implementation. Participants reported high levels of satisfaction, and anticipated that the knowledge and skills may be useful in the future. We describe a novel training program focused on the delivery of evidence-based implementation within health systems. Guided by insights from this study, methods to deliver the training on a larger scale and across different contexts are being explored. The prolonged impact of TRANSLATE will be further evaluated at trial completion. Trial registration: ANZCTR, ACTRN12618001072202. Registered on June 27, 2018