Social support in cancer: How do patients want us to help?

Abstract

Objective: Social support is fundamentally important to the well-being of patients with cancer, and informal caregivers often wish they had better insight into how to help. The aims of this study were to quantify the types of social support that patients qualitatively expressed as important, and examine whether demographics and mental health symptoms explained the type of support desired.

Methods: A sample of 82 patients with cancer (Gender: 65.9% Male, Age: M = 57.5, Race/Ethnicity: 90.2% White, non-Latino/a) completed measures of demographics, health, anxiety, and depression, and responded to an open-ended question asking them to list three types of support that they desire from their caregivers. These responses were then reliably coded into 18 different categories.

Results: Most commonly, participants expressed a desire for companionship (45%). Other common requests included empathy (33%), home care support (28%), information support (16%), being treated the same (15%), and help with appointments (13%). Patients who were more anxious were more likely to desire companionship (OR = 4.41, p = .033), and younger patients were more likely to desire home care support (OR = 7.24, p = .016).

Conclusion: Findings have implications for providing individually-tailored social support to patients with cancer.

Keywords:

• Age factors
• anxiety
• caregivers
• depression
• empathy
• home care
• precision medicine
• social support

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the University of Rochester Medical Center Department of Psychiatry, Leonard F. Salzman Research Award, and the NIGMS-sponsored Louisiana Clinical and Translational Science Center Roadmap Scholars Program (U54 GM104940).