Effectiveness of counseling in patients of breast and cervical cancer receiving chemotherapy and radiotherapy-prospective observational study

Abstract

Cancer is one of the main problems in the India and world also. From the world health organization report (2022), 10 million deaths in the year of 2022 of the entire world. This reflects one in six deaths. Side effects are very common in the cancer treatment process i.e. chemotherapy, radiotherapy and chemo radiation therapy. Proper knowledge is required in these aspects. Sometimes these side effects lead to life threatening due to lack of knowledge on side effects management while patients are in the home. These patients also need counseling, consultation and about side effects management of their treatment. This counselling leads to not only the patient’s quality of life but also improve the patients’ psychological conditions during their treatment process. In our prospective observational study, the main objectives are checking the effectiveness of before counselling and after counselling with respect to patient’s side effect management and psychological effectiveness. Finally evaluate the outcome with the counselling in both breast and cervical cancer patients. We provide counseling for cancer patients in King George Hospital, Visakhapatnam, India. In our study we used EORTC QLQ – C30 (version 3) scale for comparison of with or without counseling in the areas of side effect management, effectiveness of psychological and nutritional in breast and cervical cancer patients. Finally in our study we noticed that mostly rural area and some urban people were lack of knowledge on side effect management of cancer treatment. By providing better counseling to these patients especially in rural area people for their treatment and create awareness of cancer in group counseling for care givers then automatically better side effect management was possible in cancer patients. Pharmacist counseling is one of the important services that has been associated with improved outcome.