Delays to curative surgery beyond 12 weeks were associated with increased mortality in colorectal and breast cancers, suggesting that health provision services should be organized to avoid unnecessary treatment delays. Health care systems should also aim to reduce socioeconomic and geographic disparities and to guarantee equitable access to high quality cancer care.

Family caregivers of patients with cancer experienced high levels of anxiety and depression. Socio-demographic factors and QOL were predictors of anxiety and depression in family caregivers.

Most patients and family caregivers valued and expected family involvement in TDM. However, there is little explicit agreement in regard to which party in the dyad should take decisional leadership and who should play a supporting role.

Our findings emphasize the need for medical societies and health professionals to pay more attention to cancer stigma that patients are likely to experience during treatment.

Objective We investigated whether and how perceived social support is associated with depression and quality of life among patients with various cancer diagnoses. Methods Data were collected from 1930 cancer patients treated at the National Cancer Center and nine regional cancer centers across Korea. The Duke‐UNC functional social support scale was used to measure the perceived social support, and the PHQ‐9 and the EORTC QLQ‐C30 were used to measure the cancer patients' depression levels and quality of life, respectively. Results Subjects with low perceived social support reported significantly higher levels of depression, lower scores on all functional scales, higher scores on all three symptom scales, lower global health/quality of life scale scores, and higher scores on most single items than subjects with high perceived social support. There was no interaction between potential stressors and perceived social support, supporting the main effect model as the mechanism that the perceived social support reduce the adverse psychological outcomes. Conclusion Perceived social support was associated with mental health and quality of life in cancer patients, through direct effect rather than stress‐buffering effect. Interventions to enhance perceived social support might be helpful for improving mental health and QOL in cancer patients. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.