Patients with advanced cancer can help in their own care, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:02 — 1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Helping people with advanced cancer is facilitated by having them fill out symptom questionnaires for their medical team, who can then intervene promptly, a new study demonstrates. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, applauds the approach.

Nelson: Patients when provided the right template can inventory their symptoms more accurately than anybody else. Sometimes they can be helped by family members. Would it be possible for them to inventory their symptoms more frequently than the limited number of times that they can sit in front of a doctor or a nurse and who collects these information by asking them specific questions? You can collect it at home, you can collect it as often as you'd like, can you use that information to steer or direct the trajectory of care more productively?                         :30

Those who used the template required fewer emergency department visits and hospitalizations than those who didn’t and would recommend the practice to others. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.