Psychosocial Services: Increasing Awareness

Staying up to date with available psychosocial resources and connecting patients with the appropriate service can be a challenge. Due to this concern, coupled with the Commission on Cancer's mandate that distress screening become part of cancer care by 2015, we created an interactive, web-based tool and associated education program that aims to increase awareness of psychosocial issues, expand knowledge regarding related resources, and improve appropriateness of psychosocial referrals. Discussion around distress screenings revealed a lack of knowledge and underutilization of available psychosocial services. Because of this lack of knowledge, we created and distributed a survey for medical providers and asked for the three most common patients needs for which they make psychosocial service referrals. We also asked for the ways they would like information on psychosocial services displayed. Based on survey results, we created a web-based, interactive, decision-tree tool listing the top indicators for referral and the appropriate psychosocial provider for each of the identified needs. Additionally, the decision-tree tool includes hyperlinks to summaries of each psychosocial service and referral information for each provider. Provider emails, displayed on the summary page, are linked to the internal email system for referral requests. Further, to increase awareness of available services and the process for making referrals, we created education sessions for biomedical providers and associated staff. Ongoing education sessions, which are tied into utilization of distress screening, highlight ways to access the tool and help to increase awareness of services and appropriateness of referrals to psychosocial resources. The web-based decision-tree design is easily accessible and can assist providers in locating psychosocial services, and can improve providers' ability to connect patients to the appropriate resources. This easily accessible tool, in conjunction with ongoing education opportunities can maintain more consistent, appropriate psychosocial referrals. Information gained through the biomedical provider surveys, given both before and after the decision tree tool was launched, have assisted in providing a greater understanding of the most helpful ways to provide information about available psychosocial resources and referral processes. The process we undertook to create the decision tree tool can be applied in a variety of other settings, to develop site-spe