) Referring Patients to Cancer Prevention and Screening Clinical Trials: Primary Care Physicians' Attitudes, Knowledge, and Experience This exploratory, cross-sectional study will evaluate primary care physicians' attitudes, knowledge, and experience regarding patient referral to cancer prevention and screening trials. Through a detailed survey and semi-structured in-person interviews, this research will elucidate factors that affect physicians' decisions or intent to refer minority and female patients to prevention and screening trials. Group comparisons by physician practice characteristics, patient populations, and organizational factors will be made.
The specific aims of this study are: (a) to describe primary care physicians' attitudes, knowledge, and experience regarding cancer prevention and screening clinical trials; (b) to identify the factors that affect a physician's decision or intent to refer patients to cancer prevention clinical trials; (c) to identify barriers to physician referral of women and minorities to cancer prevention trials, and to elucidate differences among primary care physicians based on their practice characteristics, strength of academic affiliation, and patient population; and (d) to develop hypotheses on how to improve primary care physicians' referral of women and minorities to cancer prevention trials. Results from this study will inform health care providers, researchers, administrators, and policy makers about factors related to current patterns of referral to cancer prevention and screening clinical trials. We will use these exploratory findings in subsequent research that will test the hypotheses we have generated, and validate physician self-reports with other sources of data on actual practice. Findings from subsequent research will be used to develop data-based policy recommendations on how to improve primary care physicians' referral of women and minorities to cancer prevention trials.
