Improving Clinician Attitudes of Respect and Trust for Persons With Sickle Cell Disease

OBJECTIVE: To test the effect of 1 high-intensity, and 1 reduced-intensity, educational intervention designed to improve health care provider attitudes toward youth with sickle cell disease (SCD).

METHODS: We exposed a regional sample of pediatric health care providers to a 2.5-day high-intensity educational and experiential intervention using videos about the SCD patient experience. Additionally, we traveled to a different set of regional health care institutions and offered pediatric providers a reduced-intensity intervention, consisting of a 90-minute lunchtime in-service centered on our same set of videos about the patient's experience. We assessed the impact of both interventions by taking pre/post measurements of the negative and positive attitudes expressed by participating providers toward patients with SCD.

RESULTS: Both interventions tested elicited improvements in the SCD attitudes expressed by the pediatric providers as suggested through a reduction in measured negative attitude scores (20.0 vs 12.1, P < .001), and an improvement in positive attitude scores (67.1 vs 72.2, P < .001). Further testing suggested that the high-intensity intervention elicited a stronger effect than the reduced-intensity intervention across multiple attitudinal domains.

CONCLUSIONS: Video-based interventions can be used to improve the attitudes of pediatric providers toward patients with SCD. The availability of interventions of varying intensities provides greater flexibility in designing efforts to advance the quality of SCD care through the improvement of provider attitudes.