The practical challenges of recruitment and retention when providing psychotherapy to advanced breast cancer patients

Abstract

Recruitment for couple-based psychotherapy interventions is challenging. More work is required on developing acceptable and feasible recruitment processes for metastatic cancer patients to be able to access support.

Managing Cancer and Living Meaningfully (CALM): A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Psychological Intervention for Patients With Advanced Cancer

“…Limitations of this study include that it was conducted at a single site in a large Canadian city with primarily English-speaking, white, well-educated participants, who may not be representative of other settings. The recruitment rate from oncology clinics is comparable to that with other psychotherapeutic interventions in similar settings, 60 although this may limit the generalizability of the findings. Strengths include the relatively high intervention compliance and completion rates.…”

Managing Cancer and Living Meaningfully (CALM): A qualitative study of a brief individual psychotherapy for individuals with advanced cancer

“…Group interventions are considered cost-effective as well as having the potential to offer such benefits as peer support [10], normalization of the experience [11], and modeling of successful coping strategies [12]. However, recruitment for group interventions for individuals with advanced cancer is challenging [11][12][13][14][15]. In addition, individual psychotherapy tends to be preferred and is often more feasible to deliver in those with advanced disease; individual sessions can be tailored to the needs of individual patients and scheduled flexibly, taking into account other hospital appointments and fluctuations in clinical status [10,11,15,16].…”

“…The lack of empirically supported manualized individual interventions contributes to this variability and to the difficulty in establishing practice guidelines [18]. To address this gap we have developed a brief, individual, manualized psychotherapeutic intervention designed to promote psychological growth and well-being and to alleviate distress in patients with advanced cancer [13]. This treatment, referred to as Managing Cancer and Living Meaningfully (CALM), was developed by a working group on psychotherapy for patients with advanced disease, taking into account the findings of a longitudinal program of research on the psychological well-being of patients with advanced cancer [20,21].…”

Uptake and attrition in couple‐based interventions for cancer: perspectives from the literature

“…Among individual‐based interventions, the uptake rate for patients with early stage cancer has been reported at approximately 76% , and attrition rate has been reported to be as high as 54% . For patients with advanced cancer, uptake rates ranging from 4% to 62% and attrition rates of up to 66% have also been reported . For partners, uptake of psychosocial interventions ranges between 31% and 76% and attrition rates between 19.5% and 69% .…”