Enhancing the Patient Journey to Clinical Trial Enrolment With Navigation to Optimize Accrual

Less than 5% of patient enter clinical trials, despite the fact that many patients facing cancer are recommended to seek out clinical trials. One challenge of finding a clinical trial, is the lack of clinical trials at the patient's home cancer centre. The Clinical Trials Navigator (CTN) program was established to help patients, their families and heath care providers navigate the clinical trials systems across Canada in order to identify meaningful clinical trials for patients and help them enter those trials. The CTN program was piloted in Windsor, Ontario and increased clinical trials accrual for this population by 8%. This study plans to roll out to twenty centres across Canada, mimicing the process. This implementation of the CTN program will be tested by adding centres in a sequential fashion until all centres are added over the 12 month period. The objectives are improved patient enrollment which will be measured by embedded CTNs in each cancer centre, and reporting to the central site. Pre- and post-implementation structured interviews with administrators, physicians, patients and allied health care professionals will be used to assess uptake of the CTN program in each centre and reveal potential barriers to successful implementation of a nation-wide CTN program. The ability of the current CTN program to upscale to twenty centres will be measured by turn-around times of patient reports and through the structured interviews.