Would psychological assistance be helpful to me? Prevalence and profile of patients who consider psychological assistance as a resource — ASN Events
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Would psychological assistance be helpful to me? Prevalence and profile of patients who consider psychological assistance as a resource (#614)

Concha Leon 1 , Tomas Blasco 2 , Esther Jovell 3 , Rosanna Mirapeix 1 , Gloria Arenas 1 , Remei Blanco 1 , Jordi Alfaro 1 , Luis Fernandez 1 , Angeles Arcusa 1
  1. Inst. Oncol. Valles (IOV) Consorci Sanitari de Terrassa. Hospital Parc Taulí Sabadell, Terrassa, Barna, Spain
  2. Psicologia Basica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
  3. Oficina Técnica de Recerca, Consorci Sanitari de Terrassa, Terrassa, barcelona, Spain

AIM:
Although health professionals consider that psychological assistance (PA) is a useful tool to help cancer patients at the different phases of the disease, we do not know whether all patients share this opinion. Not all cancer patients ask for PA, but we do not know which reasons allow them to that decision. Availability of psychological resources and agreement about that PA would be helpful could explain this feature. The present study focuses on this second point of view and assesses the prevalence and profile of patients who believe that PA would be useful for them.

METHODS:
A sample of 352 patients (186 women and 166 men) with different diagnoses receiving their first visit in the Oncology Service were assessed using a structured questionnaire. Presence of Emotional distress (fear, anger), Effort to cope with cancer, and Belief in the helpfulness of PA, were evaluated as “High” or “Low”. Previous diagnosis of anxiety or depression prior to oncological disease was also considered.

RESULTS:
Only 86 patiens (24’5%) considered that PA would be helpful to them. These patients did not differ from the other patients of the sample in age, gender, and previous diagnosis of anxiety or depression, but they had higher proportion of cases showing high fear (43% vs. 19 % p=.00), high anger (44% vs. 18% p=.00) and high efforts to cope with the situation (44% vs. 18% p=.00).

CONCLUSIONS:
A 75% of patients do not consider PA as helpful for themselves, but we do not know whether they consider PA as unhelpful for other patients. Patients considering PA as helpful suffer emotional distress and must spent high levels of effort to cope with disease.