Outpatient and family-initiated calls to cancer nurse coordinators in an Australian Comprehensive Cancer Centre: Could volunteers play a role?
Section snippets
Introduction/Background
Healthcare services worldwide are having to respond to the ever-rising cancer burden as more people are referred for cancer treatment (Ferlay et al., 2015). The increased service demand has the potential to reduce the capacity of the nursing workforce overall to respond to cancer patient support care needs in a timely and personalised manner (Macmillan Cancer Support, 2017). Oncology nurses have reported an increased workload including the volume of patient and family-initiated telephone calls
Study design
An exploratory, descriptive research design was used. This allowed for exploration and description of the volume and nature of patient and family-initiated calls to CNCs and identification of patient characteristics. Exploratory study designs are used when little is known about a specific area of interest, in order to generate greater understanding of a phenomenon or construct and be able to describe its impact on events or persons. Data from exploratory, descriptive studies enable the
Participants
Eight nurse coordinators took part: Breast (n = 2), Upper Gastrointestinal (Upper GI) (n = 1), Gynaecological (n = 2), Urological (n = 2), and Skin and Melanoma (n = 1).
Sixty-five (33%) patient callers were within six months of their referral to the CCC. Twenty-five (13%) callers had been receiving care at the CCC between six-12 months, and 85 (43%) patients had been receiving care or follow up for more than12 months. The maximum length of time a patient had been registered at the CCC was 22 years and
Discussion
This study set out to describe the frequency of and the reasons for patient and family-initiated calls to eight CNC's from five tumour specific services in a CCC. Comparison of data across the five tumour streams allowed the research team to explore similarities and differences in reasons behind calls made to the CNCs. By considering data in this way, an approximation of calls amenable to volunteer response across the five streams could be considered. This allowed for reflection on the
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the Cancer Nurse Coordinators at the CCC and Patience Chingara, Barbara Katusabe, Freya Elise Lance, Yi Zhang for their time and commitment to the study.
Conflict of interest
No conflict of interest has been declared by the authors.
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