Assessment of Information Needs of Patients with Breast Cancer: A Hospital-Based Study in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Objective: This study assessed the information needs of breast cancer (BC) patients who presented themselves to the outpatient clinics or wards of the National Cancer Institute, Maharagama, Sri Lanka. Methods: Information needs were measured using the validated questionnaire in the vernacular (Sri Lankan Information Needs Assessment Questionnaire – BC). Results: All affected women indicated a strong need for information related to the disease, treatment, and psychosocial service while the need for information on procedures for diagnosis and physical care was not strong. Younger women (age ≤37) ( P < 0.0001) and women with higher education ( P < 0.0001) had significantly higher information needs. Conclusions: The results indicated that information needs to be addressed in educational packages require that younger women and those with higher education have specific needs.

Symptom experience in endocrine therapy for breast cancer patients: A qualitative systematic review and meta-synthesis

“…42 In the face of patients' knowledge needs, health professionals can use the Internet to provide patients with information about ET (e.g., mechanisms of treatment, rationale), side effects, and management of side effects (e.g., evidence-based strategies for each side effect). 43 This can be complemented by smart devices to intervene remotely in the patient's home via the internet. Breast cancer clubs, mutual support groups and symposiums for patients are set up on the basis of guiding patients in home management to provide a platform for mutual support and sharing of side-effect management skills.…”

Multilevel Classification of Users’ Needs in Chinese Online Medical and Health Communities: Model Development and Evaluation Based on Graph Convolutional Network

“…Recent studies on the needs of users in online medical and health communities mainly focused on the classification of information needs. Empirical studies are generally conducted on specific diseases (eg, chronic diseases such as osteoarthritis [10], diabetes mellitus [9], cardiovascular disease [11]) and certain diseases with high mortality rates (eg, breast cancer [12,13] and lung cancer [9]). The main methods for data collection are questionnaire survey [14] and machine learning-based methods [11,12,[15][16][17].…”

“…The main methods for data collection are questionnaire survey [14] and machine learning-based methods [11,12,[15][16][17]. Questionnaire survey is used to assess patients' information needs through interviews and other means [13,18], which often has the problem of unbalanced results due to small and uneven research samples. Therefore, machine learning-based methods such as text mining and topic recognition have gradually become the most common methods to study users' information needs.…”