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Pre-consultation Compassion Among Patients Referred to a Cancer Center

NCT04503681 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 374

Last updated 2024-11-21

Study results available
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Summary

Patients diagnosed with cancer commonly have a high degree of anxiety during an initial oncology consultation, which may interfere with a patient's ability to retain information required to make informed treatment decisions. A previous study randomized breast cancer survivors (volunteers) to view either (a) a brief video depicting a standard initial consultation from an oncologist or (b) an identical consultation with the addition of compassionate statements from the oncologist, and found the compassionate statements reduced anxiety among the volunteers. However, it is currently unknown if watching a video containing compassionate statements from an oncologist prior to an actual initial oncology consultation will reduce anxiety among patients referred to a cancer center. The aim of this randomized control trial is to test if watching a brief video containing compassionate statements from an oncologist, compared to watching a standard introduction video, prior to an initial oncology consultation will reduce the degree of anxiety among patients referred to a cancer center.

This is a prospective, randomized controlled clinical trial at an academic cancer center. The investigators will enroll adult patients scheduled for an initial oncology consultation. Subjects will be randomly assigned to receive a "standard introduction video" or "enhanced compassion video" for viewing prior to the initial oncology consultation. On arrival to the cancer center anxiety severity will be measured using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (HADS). The HADS has two 7-item subscales (HADS Anxiety and HADS Depression) and is well-validated among oncology patients. Wilcoxon rank-sum test will be used to test for a difference in the HADS subscales between the two video groups.

Conditions

Interventions

OTHER

Enhanced compassion video

Added five additional sentences to the standard introduction video. Those five sentences were compassion-focused statements. The compassionate statements added to the "enhanced compassion video" were based on the results of a recent systematic review of clinician compassionate behaviors, which found incorporating statements of support, acknowledgement, patient's perspective, emotion naming, and validation increased patient perception of compassion.

OTHER

Standard introduction video

Standard introduction video sent to a new patient via email introducing the new patient to the cancer center prior to the initial consultation.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • The Cooper Health System

    lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
QUADRUPLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2021-06-01
Primary Completion
2023-10-31
Completion
2023-10-31

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT04503681 on ClinicalTrials.gov