Rebecca DeBoer
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Cancer is rising in Africa, and death rates are high. Most patients arrive at advanced stages, treatment is costly for families, and many patients stop treatment before it is finished.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
patient-centered communication
global oncology
cancer care
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2029
What they work on
- Adapt the Patient-Centered Communication in Cancer Care (PCC-Ca) patient survey for Rwanda, using input from Rwandan patients, clinicians and other stakeholders at Butaro Hospital.
- Establish the psychometric properties of the adapted survey, testing whether it reliably and validly measures communication quality among Rwandan cancer patients.
- Conduct a feasibility pilot trial that uses the adapted survey to evaluate a communication skills training program for oncology clinicians in Rwanda.
More about the research
One immediate way to improve care is patient-centered communication: clinicians respond to each patient's perspective and needs, involve patients in decisions and offer emotional support. Patients and clinicians in Rwanda have pointed to serious gaps in this kind of communication. Yet no tool for measuring communication quality has been validated for African cancer care, so improvement efforts cannot be properly evaluated.
Why it matters
Better communication between clinicians and cancer patients in Rwanda could help patients stay in treatment, make better use of scarce resources, reduce clinician distress and ease suffering for patients and families. A validated patient survey would let hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa measure communication quality. It would also let them test whether clinician training actually improves it.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Matthew Hickey
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Identify patient-level barriers to taking blood pressure medication within an integrated HIV–hypertension care model in rural Kenya, using theory-informed mixed methods within the SEARCH SAPPHIRE trial.
Valencia Koomson
Tufts University, MA·Engineering
Adapt the Medtronic Empower Health app into AHOMKA, a Ghana-specific mobile health platform, using a user-centered design process that is revised step by step with feedback from patients and clinicians.
Ravi Parikh
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test in a randomized trial whether A-PACT, machine learning risk prediction paired with lay health worker phone outreach, reduces hospitalizations and intensive end-of-life care for patients with cancer.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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