JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Several healthcare professionals are responsible for the cancer patient’s care throughout their engagement with the healthcare system. One such healthcare professional is the radiotherapist, who plays a crucial role in the continuum of delivering high-quality healthcare to the cancer patient. The radiotherapist not only administers treatment but is also directly involved with the patient during treatment. Despite this direct contact with the patient, the narrative tends to focus more time on technical tasks instead of the actual patient. This task-focused interaction is often due to the highly sophisticated equipment and complex radiotherapy treatment processes that the radiotherapist is required to manage. The result is that often the patient’s important psychosocial needs are not met, and patients have acknowledged non-compliance and delayed treatment as a result.

Objective:

The scoping review aims to explore, chart and map the available literature on wholistic person-centred care in radiotherapy and to identify and present key concepts, definitions, methodologies, knowledge gaps and evidence related to wholistic person-centred care in radiotherapy.

Methods:

This protocol was developed using the methodological framework for scoping studies developed by Arksey and O’Malley and incorporates the updated frameworks suggested by Levac, Colquhoun and O'Brien and Peters, Marnie and Tricco et al as well as using the Johanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology for scoping reviews. The review will include both peer-reviewed and gray literature regarding wholistic person-centred care in radiotherapy. A comprehensive search strategy has been developed for MEDLINE (Ovid) which will be translated into the other included databases, Scopus, CINAHL (EBSCO), MEDLINE (PubMed), Embase (Elsevier), Cochrane Library, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Gray literature searching will include Google (Google books and Google Scholar), ProQuest, worldwidescience.org, OpenGrey (www.opengray.eu), and various university dissertation and thesis repositories. The title and abstract screening, full-text review and relevant data extraction will be performed independently by all three reviewers using the Covidence software which will also be used to guide the resolution of conflicts. Sources selected will be imported into Atlas.ti for analysis that will consist of content analysis, narrative and descriptive synthesis. Results will be presented using narrative, diagrammatic and tabular formats.

Results:

The review is expected to identify research gaps that will inform current and future wholistic person-centred care in radiotherapy. The review will begin on 30th June 2023 and will include all sources published in 2010 or later. Data analysis and final results will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal once the project is complete.

Conclusions:

The findings of this review are expected to provide a wide variety of strategies aimed at providing wholistic person-centred care in radiotherapy as well as some gaps in the literature. These findings will be used to inform future studies aimed at designing, developing, evaluating and implementing strategies toward improved wholistic person-centred care in radiotherapy.