How do you find a Cancer Liaison Physician (CLP) who will be effective? Or in many cases, how can I help an existing CLP be more effective? A CLP is always a busy individual who is carving out just enough time to meet their responsibilities. Our Registry Partners Consultants find it very helpful to sit at a computer with the CLP to show them examples of what data is available. Though there are many webinars available for the CLPs, one-on-one time might be the best method. The CLP webinars can be found at https://www.facs.org/quality-programs/cancer/clp/webinars. If sitting side by side is not possible, creating a WebEx is quick and a great tool to share a computer desktop.
Simply providing a list of the data items available to the CLP is not as helpful as you might think.
Your CLP can certainly read on their own but what is needed are examples that are relative to their interest.
A breast surgeon might want to see treatment for early stage disease or what the percentage is of early stage breast cancer cases. Is the percentage increasing or decreasing? A radiation oncologist definitely wants to learn the percentage of prostate cancer patients by treatment method. How far are patients traveling for their treatment? The medical oncologists may be looking for the length of time between diagnosis and treatment for lung cancer cases.
We recommend you spend some time reviewing the NCDB data yourself prior to talking with your CLP. Do some research to create reports that will be of interest. The CLP often doesn’t know what he doesn’t know! There is a gold mine of information in the NCDB database but often we have to open the door for the CLP to realize this!
Everyone has oodles of passwords including a Cancer Liaison Physician. An administrator, committee chairman or registrar is of no help to the CLP for his user name and password. This of course is for maintaining confidentiality. Anyone can ask the NCDB to re-issue the credentials to the CLP’s email, but he/she is the only who will receive them!