Enhancing Collaborative Decision-Making in Small Cell Lung Cancer Care
How can multidisciplinary care teams optimize collaborative decision-making in small cell lung cancer (SCLC) management? Dr. Jacob Sands of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute discusses the pivotal role of nurse practitioners, social workers, nurse navigators, and other supportive care team members in creating a seamless, patient-centered care experience.
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Transcript:
Dr. Nicole Rochester:
You’ve talked about collaborative decision-making. You have clearly highlighted how you all collaborate at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the importance of having these multiple visits. What about other members of the care team? How do you utilize social workers or patient navigators or other members in fostering collaborative decision-making in small cell lung cancer care?
Dr. Jacob Sands:
Well, they’re instrumental. I mean, this really is a shared team approach. Ms. McDonald and I are at the core of that. But then around us, the social worker, really important. You know, rides can often be a real barrier to getting care. And so having a social worker involved in that, that’s one aspect that’s kind of a more obvious one. Even the emotional support as well, and logistics, drug availability and programs for assisted pay, all of these types of things. We have whole teams that help with that. Nurse navigator is another core member, though.
We meet weekly with an administrative support and administrative assistant and with a nurse navigator to go over any patients that are complex and say, okay, this is what’s going on. How can we assist them better? What’s coming up? The administrative assistant knowing, oh, this person’s going to get a scan next week, but then is coming in the next day, we need those results available. Sometimes the outside hospital hasn’t even read the scan yet. They don’t have a radiology report. But we’ll review it with our radiologist as well. Because we have that scan available now. We’ll often do scans the same day.
Patients will come in, they’ll get a scan and then they come right to clinic. And we will review the scan with our radiologist. But of course, radiology, thoracic surgery, radiation, oncology, you know, the whole multidisciplinary team is a part of that. But there are also all of these other supportive members of that team and these weekly meetings, Ms. McDonald really was at the heart of that process and saying, hey, you’ve had these complicated patients. Let’s pull together a team meeting. That has been a gift.
That’s been wonderful, because then weekly we go through this and then everything is organized, and it really reduces the number of other emails or things that could potentially slip through the cracks in the process. Now, on top of that, if you go to tarlatamab, which is an inpatient dosing, which we just don’t have that in small cell lung cancer up to this point as something that requires inpatient monitoring. And as McDonald has really been part of that core of then connecting across to the inpatient team as well, and to all the nurses to then make sure we’re all on the same page.
A colleague of ours, Dr. Rotow, who’s our clinical director, of course, was quite instrumental in the implementation of these things as well. Just to say it goes out beyond our team, specifically in the small cell space. But it’s really important to be connected in all of these ways that really helps provide patients with all the resources that are available to them as well.
