A Patient Consensus for the Research in Supportive Care in French Cancer Care Centers: the CyPRES Project

Cancer Patients

Supportive care, Cancer, Health-related quality of life, Consensus, Participative approach, Patient involvement, DELPHI method

In oncology a number of supportive care therapies are proposed to patients. This study will identify the different therapies and prioritize these therapies from the patients' perspectives. This study will provide a framework for optimizing supportive care strategies and identifying those therapies that need to be validated by clinical trials.

In oncology, supportive care should be used along with curative treatment or palliative care in order to improve patients' health-related quality of life, overall survival and to better support treatment side effects as well as the disease evolution. Unfortunately, they are not widely used in clinical practice. A direct assessment of the needs perceived unmet by patients could allow to assess the magnitude of expectations to better target treatments as example. A prospective assessment of the expectations and needs of the patients is thus essential. This would also allow help to highlight the convergence between supportive care proposed and used and those expected by patients. The first step to understanding how to optimize the use of resources and to improve the quality of care is to identify patient's expectations. Moreover, it is now well recognized that patients should play a key role in the research and that their active participation in research can increase the relevance of the research. In this context, the CyPRES project aims to: 1. assess through national consensus the patients' expectations in terms of supportive care in order to help both clinicians and health care services; 2. prioritize them and to arrange resources according to priority needs identified; 3. identify supportive care for which no previous research (evidence-based medicine) has demonstrated their usefulness. A randomized clinical trial will thus be proposed; 4. Involve patients in the written, conduct and analyses, as well as communications of the randomized clinical trial.

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France, Martinique