Interprofessional counselling of oncology patients on complementary and integrative health care

Patients treated for cancer may experience physical and psychological side-effects of their treatment and often express the need to alleviate their symptoms with complementary and integrative health care (CIH). To address patients’ needs, an interprofessional counselling structure has been implemented in the study CCC-Integrativ, in four Comprehensive Cancer Centres (CCC) in Germany. This study aimed to explore doctor-nurse-patient interactions during CIH counselling whilst being treated at the CCC. This qualitative study analysed 32 audio-recorded counselling sessions (8 per CCC), of which only the first 16 were interprofessional sessions. The coding system was developed in a deductive-inductive way on the basis of a literature review and also included the communication goals of the blended-learning program all doctors and nurses attended prior to the start of counselling. Thus, all transcripts will be coded according to the following communication goals: patient-centred, interprofessional, evidence-based, and activating. MAXQDA was used to achieve inter-rater reliability between the two main raters. The qualitative analysis is still ongoing. Data will be analysed comprehensively if the patient was in the centre of counselling, if the goal of a patient-centred counselling was achieved, if there were differences with regard to diadic and triadic counselling, and if/how the patient became a “member of the interprofessional counselling team”. Triadic interaction in the CIH consultation is complex and requires that the doctors and nurses not only have interprofessional skills, but also support and activate the patients in the use self-care Methods: such as CIH.