Introduction: Clinicians’ predictions of survival in palliative cancer patients are usually based solely on clinical intuition, which is often inaccurate. The PiPS models use objective clinical data to predict whether patients with advanced cancer will die within “days”, “weeks” or “months+”. We are currently validating PiPS in a large sample of palliative patients (n=1884) with advanced cancer. This paper presents data from a nested qualitative study that explored clinicians’ views on the acceptability and utility of predictor models in practice, and barriers and facilitators to their use.

Methods: We recruited a purposive sample of clinicians (n=32), which included palliative care specialists, oncologists, GPs and nurses. Clinicians’ were asked about their experiences of discussing prognosis with palliative patients and carers, views and opinions of prognostic models and facilitators and barriers to the use of PiPS models within clinical practice.

Results: Overall participants considered the PiPS models to be acceptable and beneficial in three main ways: a) more accurate in predicting life expectancy, compared with clinicians’ intuition b) a useful aid to help share prognostic information with patients and carers c) beneficial as an educational tool to improve clinicians’ confidence in making accurate prognostic predictions. Barriers identified were: time and resource constraints, preferring to rely on own clinical judgement, clinicians’ avoidance of life expectancy discussions.

Conclusions: Our study demonstrates the acceptability of PiPS models for use by clinicians.  We identified a number of important facilitators and barriers to use, that need to be addressed if PiPS models are to be implemented into clinical practice.

MASCC/ISOO Annual Meeting on Supportive Care in Cancer