One of the first requests I receive from cancer organizations that want to improve support around intimacy, relationships, and sexual wellbeing is, “Can you provide training for our staff?”

It’s a reasonable request. Training is one of the most familiar ways healthcare organizations respond to an identified gap. It’s structured, measurable, and relatively straightforward to implement. Staff attend, they learn, and everyone leaves with the shared hope that patient care will improve.

But, after observing what happens next, I’ve become increasingly convinced that many organizations are hoping training will solve problems it was never designed to solve.

When patients feel unseen, unsupported, or unsure where to turn with concerns about intimacy during or after cancer, the explanation is rarely as simple as, “Staff don’t know enough.” More often, what emerges is a much broader picture. Clinicians may care deeply about the issue (many do!) and even feel reasonably comfortable discussing it, yet the organization has not built the structures that allow those conversations to happen consistently or lead somewhere meaningful.

This is why I have come to believe that intimacy-informed cancer care is not primarily a training challenge. It’s actually an implementation challenge.

Let’s break this down a bit to understand why.

Training develops people; however, implementation develops organizations.

A clinician can attend an outstanding educational program and return to a workplace where there is no agreed-upon workflow, no referral pathway, no patient resources, no documentation process, no leadership expectation, and no clarity about who is responsible for what. In that environment, the knowledge gained during training has very little opportunity to become routine practice.

The result is something that can be seen often. Staff become more aware of patients’ unmet needs, but they still lack the organizational support needed to respond consistently or even effectively. Awareness increases while capability remains largely unchanged.

This is one of the reasons my consultancy CancerEVOLVE approaches intimacy-informed care as an organizational system rather than as an educational topic alone.

Patients do not experience healthcare as a collection of individual trainings. They experience it as a coordinated, or sometimes uncoordinated, system. They remember whether someone asked about concerns that mattered to them. They remember whether anyone knew how to respond. They remember whether they received practical guidance, trustworthy resources, appropriate referrals, or simply an uncomfortable silence or awkward deflection.

From a patient’s perspective, these experiences are inseparable. Every interaction either reinforces the feeling that intimacy is a legitimate part of cancer care or quietly communicates that it falls outside the boundaries of what the organization is prepared to address.

This is why training, while valuable, represents only one piece of a much larger picture.

An organization that hopes to provide consistent, high-quality support must also think about culture, workflows, leadership, role clarity, referral pathways, patient resources, documentation, specialist access, and long-term sustainability. These elements work together. Strengthening only one while overlooking the others is much like replacing a single component in a much larger machine and expecting the entire system to function differently.

Another misconception I frequently encounter is the belief that intimacy-informed care requires every clinician to become an expert in sexuality or relationships.

Fortunately, that is not the goal.

The goal is to create an organization in which every professional understands their role within a broader continuum of care. Some clinicians may simply normalize the topic and offer permission for patients to ask questions. Others may provide basic guidance or educational resources. More specialized concerns can be directed toward clinicians with additional expertise. Just as we would never expect every member of an oncology team to perform surgery or provide psychotherapy, we should not expect every clinician to become an intimacy specialist or sex therapist. We should, however, expect (and support!) every member of the team to understand how patients enter the system, what support can be offered within their role, and where patients should go next.

When organizations begin thinking this way, the focus shifts. Instead of asking, “What training do our staff need?” they begin asking, “What is preventing patients from receiving the support they need?”

You can see those are very different questions.

Sometimes the answer really is additional education. However, just as often, the greatest opportunity lies elsewhere. A referral pathway may need to be clarified. Patient resources may need to be developed and made available. Existing services may need to be better connected. Leadership may need to establish clearer expectations and protocols. Small adjustments to workflows may make meaningful conversations far more likely to occur than another educational event ever could.

This is why CancerEVOLVE rarely begins with a predetermined solution. Every organization is different. Some have strong psychosocial teams but fragmented referral systems. Others have excellent resources that staff rarely use. Some have passionate champions but little organizational alignment. Others have widespread interest but no clear starting point.

Understanding where those opportunities exist is far more valuable than assuming another training will address them.

That philosophy is what led to the development of the CancerEVOLVE Readiness Snapshot. Rather than beginning with a recommendation, the Readiness Snapshot gives organizations an opportunity to step back and thoughtfully examine their current approach to intimacy-informed cancer care. After completing the Snapshot, your responses will be personally reviewed to identify your organization’s strengths, gaps, and opportunities across the key domains of intimacy-informed cancer care. You’ll receive a summary of the findings, along with an invitation to schedule a complimentary consultation to discuss the results and explore potential next steps.

For many organizations, the Snapshot often serves as the beginning of a broader exploration. Sometimes that leads to referral pathway mapping or implementation planning. Sometimes it identifies opportunities to strengthen patient resources, support groups, leadership alignment, or staff guidance tools. Sometimes training is exactly the right next step, but now it is connected to a larger strategy that allows the learning to translate into meaningful change. And for organizations ready to think more comprehensively, CancerEVOLVE also offers organizational assessments, implementation consulting, and long-term partnership to help embed intimacy-informed care into everyday practice.

The goal has never been to deliver more training.

The goal is to help organizations build the systems that make compassionate, consistent, intimacy-informed cancer care possible.

Take your Readiness Snapshot today! Click here.