Conference Coverage

Education for Patients With Advanced Breast Cancer During the COVID-19 Pandemic

12/30/2022

In this video, Abbey J. Kaler, MS, APRN, FNP-C, speaks about the need for ongoing educational resources for patients with advanced and metastatic breast cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic, including launching a weekly educational webinar and its impact on patients. She also discussed these topics during a session at SABCS 2022 titled “Providing Educational Resources During the Pandemic for Advanced Breast Cancer Patients.”

Additional Resource:

  • Kaler AJ. Providing educational resources during the pandemic for advanced breast cancer patients. Talk presented at: San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium 2022; December 6-10, 2022; San Antonio, Texas. Accessed December 15, 2022. https://www.sabcs.org/

Abbey J. Kaler, MS, APRN, FNP-C

Abbey J. Kaler, MS, APRN, FNP-C, is the supervisor advanced practice provider at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in the advanced breast cancer program (Houston, TX).

 

TRANSCRIPTION:

Abbey J Kaler, MS, APRN, FNP-C: My name is Abbey Kaler, and I am the supervisor advanced practice provider at MD Anderson Cancer Center, leading the Advanced Breast Cancer Program. For our educational webinar, the ABC’s of Healthy Living in Challenging Times, we created this in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to COVID-19, the Advanced Breast Cancer program held a quarterly in-person town hall series in which we would all gather in a large room and we would hear from two to three latest professionals and have a presentation. Well, in light of COVID-19, we were no longer able to do that and really heard from our patients the need for this ongoing, rapidly changing information in the environment we were in. And so at that time we decided to shift our quarterly in-person town hall to more of a weekly educational webinar.

And so we have been holding this educational webinar since April of 2020 so we've held over 130 webinars to date. We've covered various topics and our poster was about highlighting the impact of our webinar. And our patient said that they highly approved or greatly approved of our webinar series and that it made an impact on their care. Because of our webinar, they felt that they were more empowered to talk to their provider about side effects or services that they had seen mentioned on a webinar, that they were more likely to entertain enrolling in a clinical trial. They were more likely to seek out support services. And lastly, they found a community of patients like themselves that they could relate to. And so we are really proud of our webinar and that our patients feel that it is benefiting them, and we look forward to continuing our more educational initiatives through this weekly educational format.

I think the take-home from our educational webinar poster is that our webinar is open to everyone, patients, caregivers, faculty, staff, community members. Everyone always has something to learn. And so if anyone is interested in participating, they can view the poster and they can contact us to be added to our webinar email list. Thank you for having me.