Priority Supportive Care Needs of Patients Living with and Beyond Cancer: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Introduction: Supportive care needs are felt needs expressed by the patients and family members of cancer patients. Cancer disease itself cause many kinds of problems in cancer patients. The identification and management of supportive care needs is essential to provide most priority care expressed by people with cancer. Detail information about the supportive care need can help service planning/redesign of each individual cancer patients. This study aims to identify different kinds of supportive care needs with priority among cancer patients of different country.

Methods: This systematic review study included only English published articles between 1995 Jan to 2020 from PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and Science direct, Google Scholar and JSTOR. The extraction of data was done by two independent authors and a third independent author checked the data extraction. The PRISMA statement was adopted.

Results: Total eleven studies(cross sectional descriptive- 7, qualitative-1 prospective cohort design-1, design not mentioned) were included in this review. Psychological supportive care need was the first priority supportive care needs among most of the respondents and SCNS-SF 34 was the most frequently used scale in the studies.

Conclusions: Different methodologies used in different studies hinder the analysis of types of supportive care needs among patients living with cancer and minimize the quality of generalization. Estimation of sample size was lacking in ninety percent of studies. Identification of support as per type of cancer is also essential to prioritize their problem.