CANCER TREATMENT OFTEN CAUSES HIGH LEVELS OF STRESS, affecting patients' quality of life and outcomes and necessitating a holistic approach to care. Patients with cancer may also experience physiologic stress from the disease process or cancer treatment and its side effects. According to Hoffman, McCarthy, Recklitis, and Ng (2009), cancer survivors often report an increased prevalence of serious psychological distress, including patients who have been in remission for five years or longer. In addition, patients with cancer are often hospitalized because of acute conditions. In a study by Numico et al. (2015) on hospital admissions of patients with cancer, 74% of admissions were urgent and 80% were a result of uncontrolled symptoms. The top troublesome symptoms reported by patients in Numico et al.'s (2015) study were dyspnea (16%) and pain (15%). Sixty-one percent of the patients in Numico et al.'s (2015) study were discharged to home, 26% died during hospitalization, and 11% were transferred to a palliative care setting. Being in the hospital may be a stressful experience for many patients because of the unfamiliar environment, feeling a loss of control, noise, an inability to fulfill roles in the family, worries about financial issues, the fear of the unknown, and the unpredictability of their response to cancer treatment (Abuatiq, 2015).Healthcare providers are in a strategic position to identify and minimize the anticipated stressors of patients and caregivers, particularly during the hospitalization phase. Identifying appropriate interventions to minimize patient and caregiver stressors has the potential to promote effective disease management, encourage family participation in the care plan, and improve the quality of health care. Describing and understanding the stressful experiences of patients and their family caregivers can allow healthcare providers to implement stress reduction strategies that improve patients' overall satisfaction with the care that they receive during hospitalization. This study describes patients' self-reports of stress and caregivers' perceptions of the stress experienced by patients during hospitalization for cancer.
Theoretical FrameworkStress is a highly subjective experience that can prompt an acute onset of physical, emotional, and mental strain, which may affect a patient's ability to heal and cope (Papathanasiou, Tsaras, Neroliatsiou, & Roupa, 2015). The concept of stress is defined as "a state of mental or emotional strain KEYWORDS
