Enhancing Teachable Moment Communication for Smoking Cessation and Weight Management

Case Western Reserve University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Clinician Patient Communication; Smoking Cessation; Weight Management

Treatments: Other: Teachable Moment Communication Process

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01575886

R01CA105292_ETM

R01CA105292 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Details and patient eligibility

About

The goal of this study is to test an intervention that teaches clinicians to integrate the use of 'teachable moments' with the key skills of motivational interviewing tailored to address smoking and weight management in the primary care outpatient visit setting.

Full description

A large burden of cancer morbidity and mortality is potentially preventable by changes in personal health behaviors. Health behavior advice (HBA) by primary care physicians, who provide basic health care to most Americans, holds great promise as a strategy to alter cancer-related health behaviors and to reduce morbidity and mortality. One potentially powerful strategy is the use of illness visits as a 'teachable moment'(TM) for health behavior change. Our in-depth analysis of audio recorded physician-patient interactions has led to new discoveries of the communication elements of a TM. First, effective TM's involve linking a health behavior to a salient patient problem and positioning the health behavior as a problem. Persuasion is accomplished by suggesting that changing the health behavior will improve the patient's salient concern. If done skillfully, the patient accepts the portrayal of the health behavior as a relevant problem and exhibits uptake of the health behavior change talk, possibly expressing a commitment to change. Our data reveal that TMs occur in 20% of health behavior discussions between physician and patient. More frequent (43%) , however, are TM 'attempts' which fail to engage the patient. These attempts lack two essential aspects of good patient-centered advice 1) eliciting the patient's readiness to change and 2) responding in alignment with the patient's expressed stage of change. We also observed 'missed opportunities' (20%) where the health behavior advice failed to link to a salient patient concern.

Therefore, the goal of this randomized trial is to test an intervention that teaches clinicians to integrate the use of TMs with the key skills of motivational interviewing tailored to address smoking and weight management in the outpatient visit setting. This goal will be accomplished using a group randomized trial of 32 clinicians (1152 patients). The initial Teachable Moment Communication Process (TMCP) intervention will focus on smoking cessation as the health behavior topic. After the initial intervention is evaluated, the clinicians assigned to the control group will receive a revised TMCP intervention with a focus on weight management. The TMCP intervention involves multiple modalities including skills-based training, practice with standardized patients and on-site coaching. Audio recordings of visits with patients who smoke or are obese will be used to assess both intervention and control clinicians' health behavior change strategies at baseline and post intervention. Patient surveys will be used to assess the effect of the observed health behavior change strategies on immediate and short-term patient outcomes. Leveraging clinicians' naturally-occurring health behavior change strategies by fostering the development of more effective communication skills has great potential to enhance patient health behavior change. This study will test this strategy and generate rich data about its effectiveness and how it is tailored by physicians in practice for both smoking and weight management; two important risk factors for cancer and other devastating chronic diseases.

Enrollment: 840 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 70 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Patients visiting a clinician participating in the study on data collection days.
• For data collection Time 1 and 2, patients who report smoking at least 1 cigarette per day.
• For data collect times 3 and 4, patients who have a BMI > 30 or patients who have a BMI >25 and self-reporting any one of the following chronic conditions: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease or diabetes.

Exclusion criteria

• Inability to comprehend the invitation to participate in the study in English or Spanish
• No access to a telephone and no mailing address to complete follow up surveys.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

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840 participants in 2 patient groups

Smoking cessation intervention

Experimental group

Description:

This group receives the teachable moment communication process intervention focused on smoking cessation and contributes data at baseline (Time 1) and post intervention (Time 2).

Treatment:

Other: Teachable Moment Communication Process

Delayed intervention group

Other group

Description:

This group serves as the comparison group for the evaluation of the smoking cessation intervention at Time 1 and Time 2 data collection to complete the group randomized trial. This group of clinicians then has Time 3 data collection focused on weight management receives a revised intervention focused on teachable moment communication for weight management and has Time 4 data collected to evaluate the teachable moment for weight management training as a pre-post design.

Treatment:

Other: Teachable Moment Communication Process