Nursing Outcomes of Patient’s Comfort during Neoplastic Chemotherapy: An Integrative Review

Abstract

Nursing Outcomes of Patient's Comfort during Neoplastic Chemotherapy: An Integrative Review C urrently, cancer patients require more aggressive and systemic treatments. However, chemotherapy often causes discomfort which affects patient's well-being during and after cancer treatment. 1 The nursing mission then focuses on patient's comfort and the interventions offered to relieve discomfort. The care is delivered after an assessment of patients' needs, implementations of care, and outcomes from such interventions. These nursing interventions include physical and psycho-spiritual contexts intended to alleviate the patient's discomfort observed from signs and symptoms. There is a great opportunity to address the patient's needs and to understand him/her, which increases the likelihood that patient will be safe during treatment. This is considered a relief effort. 2 Comfort is theoretically defined at this point as the state of being meeting the basic human need for ease, relief, and transcendence. 3 Nurse-led care and management have a significant impact on patient experience and outcomes. However, currently there are no definitive criteria in establishing what constitutes sufficient evidence of this beyond using the outcome. Previous reviews have used an overview of evidence-based intervention studies. 4 Evidence-base-nursing outcomes in the physical dimensions of cancer patients during chemotherapy were reviewed and used to develop a set of indicators that are suitable for performance measurement and to identify the need for quality improvement.

Exploring Discomfort Experienced During Chemotherapy in Thai Breast Cancer Patients

“…The factors leading to discomfort affect the patient's quality of life. The specific issues in Thai culture mainly focus on problems (Mick, 2007;Phongnopakoon et al, 2018) related to religious beliefs (Song et al, 2014). The psychological strategies to change the social and surrounding environment could decrease chemotherapy side effects, make a good attitude, and endorse a tremendous lifestyle change (Rattanakanlaya, 2014;Krongyuth, 2018).…”