Proactive routine monitoring and intervention to reduce the psychosocial impact of cancer therapy

Abstract

Much of the psychosocial morbidity experienced by cancer patients goes undetected and therefore untreated. This paper describes infrastructure to routinely screen patients for psychosocial problems and provide targeted intervention in the cancer care setting. Cancer patients will complete a psychosocial screening survey via touchscreen computer at three outpatient visits. A report containing a summary of their responses, score interpretation and recommended management strategies will be printed immediately and placed in their file for follow-up by their health care team. Centres will be able to track changes in their patients psychosocial outcomes over time, and in response to changes in service delivery. Benchmarking reports will be produced annually to feed back performance data to individual centres on their patients' psychosocial outcomes.

Keywords:

• Psychosocial morbidity
• cancer
• touchscreen computer survey