This study builds on the CONTACT-study, a before-after pilot-study that aims to study the impact of the development, implementation and evaluation of a care pathway for patients treated with oral anticancer drugs (OACD)

The aim of CONTACT-2 is to scale up this pilot study to an additional number of oncology centres in Flanders (N=10). In contrast to CONTACT-1, the development, implementation and evaluation of the care pathway will be self-directed by the participating CONTACT-2 oncology centres. In the four pilot-oncology centres from CONTACT-1, all assessments in the before-after study were performed by the research team. Moreover, the development of the care pathway in each hospital was coached intensively by the research team. In CONTACT-2, oncology centres will take the lead in data collection, the development and implementation of the care pathway, guided by the CONTACT-Toolkit that has been developed based on the experiences from CONTACT-1 and international guidelines on the implementation of care pathways/complex interventions.

we hypothesise that the implementation of a care pathway will improve level of self-management and level of performance of patient-centred care, and will increase adherence, patient satisfaction and health-related quality of life. Next, we hypothesise that the care pathway will improve counselling practice, interdisciplinary collaboration, self-efficacy and self-confidence of HCPs. The impact of a care pathway on the above outcomes will be investigated by means of various assessments, that have been selected by the research team based on their experiences from CONTACT-1. Moreover, we hypothesize that the development and implementation process will be more efficient in the CONTACT-2 oncology centres, who will need less intensive support of the research team, due to the CONTACT-Toolkit. A process evaluation will be conducted to test this last hypothesis.