Insights Into the Efficacy of Mentorship Programs in Improving Oncology Clinical Trial Enrollment

Christa Marie Braun-Inglis, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, AOCNP, University of Hawaii Cancer Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, discusses the development of a pilot mentorship program for advanced practice providers (APP) and clinical research coordinators (CRCs) which resulted in higher clinical trial enrollment and minority participation. 

Based on these findings, the program is now currently enrolling for a nationwide expansion. Christa stated, “We really believe that when we are focusing on the supportive care types of trials, that that really is in the wheelhouse for the APPs as so many of us are experts of symptom management and care delivery in our everyday practice.”

Transcript:

Aloha. My name is Christa Braun-Inglis, and I'm a nurse practitioner and associate researcher at the University of Hawaii Cancer Center and the Hawaii NCI Community Oncology Research Program.

I'm here today to talk about my education and mentorship intervention of oncology advanced practice providers here in Hawaii. In 2021, I was fortunate enough to get a grant through the NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) to develop a mentorship intervention for advanced practice providers here in Hawaii to increase diverse accrual for supportive care clinical trials through the NCI. I was able to mentor 6 oncology advanced practice providers, and we focused on 4 different NCI supportive care protocols.

We started this in October 2021 with a kickoff meeting between the APPs and their clinical research associate partners. At this kickoff meeting we just described the importance of the role of the APP in clinical research and how they could add value to clinical research within our community. After the kickoff meeting, the APPs and the clinical research associates would meet on average once a week just to do a short screening of their clinics to see if any of the patients were eligible for the trials that we had identified for this project, and then the groups would actually meet once a month. It didn't always work because APPs have really busy schedules, but we tried to meet once a month to problem solve, identify the barriers, and come up with solutions to help to make this project successful.

After the end of the 1-year project, we actually were able to have the APPs had a total of 27 unique accruals to these different studies, and the APPs also got more involved with clinical research leadership within our NCORP, for instance. Now several of those APPs lead as site PIs and also lead our supportive care disease specific working groups. 

Out of this project, the APPs have really become leaders in supportive care trials throughout our community. They've also engaged with us at the NCORP in terms of being on different types of disease specifics groups as well, for instance, like the GI disease working group, the breast disease working group, and the hematology disease working group. As I mentioned, they also lead several studies within our NCORP. All of the APPs that did participate in the project as well as the clinical research associates felt that the intervention was feasible as well as appropriate, and they could work it into their schedule and felt it to be of value.

We were able to take this pilot data from this project, and we have recently opened a national NCORP study throughout the country, which is now enrolling 70 APPs from different NCORP sites, and they're being randomized to either the education and mentorship intervention versus an education control arm. For this national study, we are measuring APP research self-efficacy as the primary outcome and accrual to studies and how many studies are opened at the sites are secondary outcomes. 

Of course, we're also looking at feasibility and acceptability at practices across the country because we realize that something that may work in Hawaii may not work everywhere else so we're trying to figure out how acceptable and feasible is a mentorship intervention. We actually changed this intervention a bit to not meet monthly. We've brought the meetings down to 5 meetings for the year for the APPs that are randomized to the intervention arm because we did recognize through our local pilot project that meeting once a month was somewhat labor intensive and may not be feasible for all APPs.

We're hopeful through the project we had here in Hawaii and now we've moved it on to this national study, that APPs will get more involved in clinical research. We really believe that when we are focusing on the supportive care types of trials, that that really is in the wheelhouse for the APPs as so many of us are experts of symptom management and care delivery in our everyday practice.

Source: 

Braun-Inglis CM, Springer A, Ferguson V, et al. Oncology advanced practice provider mentorship and paired clinical research coordinator support to enhance accrual to NCI supportive care trials. Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology. Published online June 25, 2025. doi:10.6004/jadpro.2025.16.7.18