Patient Navigation to Improve Early Access to Supportive Care for Patients with Advanced Cancer in Resource-limited Settings: a Randomized Controlled Trial.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Patient navigation improves access to early supportive care, advance care planning, and pain for patients with advanced cancer in resource-limited settings. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: The early implementation of supportive care in oncology is recommended by international guidelines, but this might be difficult to achieve in resource limited settings. This randomized clinical trial including 134 Mexican patients with advanced cancer, demonstrates that a multidisciplinary patient navigation intervention can improve the early access to supportive and palliative care interventions, increase advance care planning, and reduce symptoms compared with usual oncologist-guided care alone. These results demonstrate that patient navigation represents a potentially useful solution to achieve the adequate implementation of supportive and palliative care in resource-limited settings globally. PMID: 33210345 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: The Oncologist - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Tags: Oncologist Source Type: research