Education and Training Resources for Professionals

An interactive training simulation from the American Cancer Society for primary health care providers. 

This simulation provides a safe and responsive learning environment for providers to practice effective communication techniques for discussing nutrition, physical activity, and obesity risk with cancer survivors. This training will allow providers to be more confident in engaging in these conversations, and in recommending strategies and techniques for maintaining a healthy weight and being active.

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based clinical method for identifying and building motivation to make healthy choices and engage in healthy behaviors. MI skills help clinicians to: build healthy relationships, explore patients’ needs, values and preferences, respond with empathy, personalize and share information, collaborate on decisions, and empower patients to achieve their goals.

The simulation allows learners to enter a virtual environment and engage in role-play conversations with emotionally-responsive virtual humans. Through practice and receiving personalized feedback, users learn and assess their competency to lead similar conversations in real life.

• Visit the Let’s Talk: Nutrition, Physical Activity and Cancer Survivorship simulation site

Support for the professional patient navigation workforce

This standardized training and credentialing program for professional patient navigators supports the navigation workforce in improving care and reducing disparities. This program will meet the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) requirements for "Principal Illness Navigation" reimbursement.

• Visit the Patient Navigation Training and Credentialing page

Cancer caregiving can be intense and episodic, resulting in high levels of psychosocial distress. As a critical part of the health care team, caregivers deserve support that targets their emotional and mental health needs.   

The primary focus of the Caregivers Clinic is to provide counseling from psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners to help caregivers navigate and cope with the complexities of providing care while also managing their own emotions. To this end, we have developed a toolkit to manualize the process of establishing a Caregivers Clinic.

The Caregivers Clinic Toolkit is a comprehensive set of tools and resources that oncology leaders, clinicians, and staff members can use to implement psychosocial services for family caregivers. It also addresses key areas of clinic development, including referral sources and triage processes, billing codes, and staffing.

• Caregivers Clinic Toolkit

Toolkit Webinar Series

• Webinar 1: Background, Identifying Champions, Rallying Support, and Staffing 
• Webinar 2: Referrals, Screening, Diagnosing, and Billing 
• Webinar 3: Approaches to Care and Training, Marketing, Evaluation, and Common Pitfalls