The rising demand for palliative-care (PC) in Turkey, driven by cancer, has prompted increased attention since the national PC policy in 2010. Despite this, the healthcare system predominantly focuses on curative care, lacking PC integration. This is due to combination of administrative obstacles, fragmented coordination, education and training scarcity. Thus urgent strategies are required to address the growing PC gap. This qualitative study explores the perspectives of PC professionals and policymakers, providing valuable insights for national policy and program development.
This study employed an exploratory approach using key informant interviews. Interviews were conducted using semi-structured questionnaire. It sought to collect relevant contextual information in order to achieve its aim. Thematic content analysis was employed to examine and interpret the data.
Twenty-one participants, comprising nurses, specialists, and oncologists, were interviewed. The findings are encompassed by eight themes. 1) Integrated Care, highlights the importance of cohesive collaboration among diverse healthcare providers, social care services, and primary care systems to ensure comprehensive and effective care. 2) Meeting social care needs underscores significance of addressing a wide spectrum of patient requirements, including psychosocial support. 3) PC education emphasizes necessity of equipping healthcare professionals with the requisite skills and knowledge through comprehensive training. 4) Legalizing do-notresuscitate orders draws attention to the critical discussion surrounding end-of-life decisions. 5) Empowering communities recognizes bridging knowledge gaps among patients and caregivers. 6) Decision-Making underscores the importance of informed and collaborative decision-making processes. 7) Cultural considerations urge the adoption of culturally sensitive approaches. 8) Ongoing challenges shed light on persistent issues such as provider attitudes, and administrative hurdles.
This study highlights essential factors for establishing an integrated PC program for cancer patients in Turkey. The existing healthcare system in Turkey offers opportunities for advanced PC. Successful implementation demands strategic actions to facilitate meaningful transformation.
Breast cancer treatments can impact the patients’ health-related quality of life (HR-QoL). This criterion is relevant for drug reimbursement decisions. We wanted to assess the usage of HR-QoL in health technology assessments (HTA).
All HAS (Haute Autorité de Santé, the French HTA body) opinions published between January 1, 2009 and March 31, 2023 for the reimbursement of breast cancer drugs were analysed.
51 distinct appraisals were found during the period, corresponding to 45 product-specific indications, of which 36 (80 %) including clinical studies in which HR-QoL was an endpoint. HAS explicitly rejected HR-QoL data in 25 out of 36 (69 %) indications with such data. Rejections are justified by methodological weaknesses, including lack of adjustment for type I error inflation (n=21 indications), open-label treatment (n=7), lack of a pre-specified clinically relevant HR-QoL threshold (n=6) or missing data (n=6). Regardless of rejection status, HR-QoL results were not mentioned as a determinant of value assessment in 3/36 (8 %) instances (2/25 for rejected data).
HR-QoL data are inconsistently present in HTA assessments of new breast cancer drugs. Their methodological quality often hinders their use in determining the drug’s value.
A rigorous and acceptable comparative experimental framework is expected for HR-QoL assessments. More detail on the precise impact of the absence or presence of HR-QoL data in the determination of the drug’s added value could help understanding how this dimension is influential in the assessments.
This report analyzes the evolution of cancer nursing research in Italy, focusing on 207 publications from nursing journals indexed in MEDLINE. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we identified four primary research topics from the included abstracts: Patient-Centered Care, Clinical Nursing Practice, Healthcare Institutions and Systems, and Research and Data Analysis. The temporal trends reveal a shift from foundational studies on healthcare systems in the late 1990s to more recent emphases on patient-centered care and clinical practice. This progression underscores the growing importance of personalized healthcare approaches. Our findings highlight the need for continued investment in innovative nursing interventions and advanced technologies, such as telehealth, to enhance patient outcomes. Research priorities need to investigate how to tailor nursing interventions to individual patient characteristics, such as their cultural background, lifestyle, and personal values, in the area of clinical nursing practice, which is less represented in the literature thus far. The limited publications regarding clinical nursing practice in the Italian context might reflect the need to strengthen cancer nursing as a specialization in Italy to trigger research and practice that address unmet patient needs. The current analysis provides a foundation for future comprehensive studies and strategic development of a research agenda for cancer nursing research in Italy, led by the Italian Association of Cancer Nursing.