Formal assessment of teamwork among cancer health care professionals in 3 large tertiary centers in Nigeria.

e18126 Background: Cancer is fast becoming a common cause of death in developing world. Over the last decade, there have been strategies to bring quality cancer care to underserved patients around the world. In low-income countries, poor utilization of principles of teamwork is a major barrier to achieving quality services. The intent of this study is to assess teamwork as perceived by the health care workers caring for cancer patients Methods: We conducted a survey among health care professionals involved in cancer care in 3 tertiary centers in the southwestern part of Nigeria from July to November 2016. Respondents rated teamwork using the previously validated ÒSafety Attitudes QuestionnaireÓ. For this analysis we focused on the teamwork climate subscale. This subscale is scored on a scale of 0-100 with mean (SD) values,in US ambulatory population of 69.7 (17). We compared ratings by professionals using analysis of variance Results: Overall 373 professionals completed the survey: Physicians (47%), nurses (14%), pharmacists (6%) and others (33%). Some results are shown in table Conclusions: Cancer care is complex and depends on teamwork amongst health care professionals to achieve optimal outcomes. While overall teamwork scores was consistent with US ambulatory studies , there are important variations that provide targets for intervention. Physicians rated teamwork poorly both intra and inter professionally. Pharmacists rated inter professional teamwork with nurses particularly poorly. Further data on additional subscales of the instrument and by individual centers will be presented. Efforts to transform cancer care need to focus on building trust among the key stakeholders. This is true in developing world where there is a need to maximize the use of limited resources to improve patient outcomes. [Table: see text]