Feasibility of a multidisciplinary intervention to help cancer patients return to work

Abstract

This study evaluates feasibility of a multidisciplinary intervention combining occupational counselling with physical exercise to enhance cancer patients' return to work, assesses whether care providers and patients were satisfied with the intervention, and describes barriers to and facilitators of execution. Newly diagnosed cancer patients, treated with chemotherapy and on sick leave from (self-)employment participated. Patients received counselling from an oncological occupational physician (OOP), were assessed by a sports physician, and performed a 12-week training programme supervised by physiotherapists. Care providers completed registration forms to collect data on reach, dose delivered and received in executing the protocol and were interviewed about their satisfaction and barriers to and facilitators of execution. Patients completed three questionnaires on satisfaction and usefulness of the intervention. Fifty-six per cent of all patients were eligible (reach). In total, 123 patients participated. For all intervention components dose delivered exceeded 75%; dose received ranged from 49%-79%. Overall, patients and care providers were satisfied and perceived the intervention as useful. Care providers considered the intervention feasible, while execution was facilitated by highly motivated patients and impeded by physical limitations hindering exercise. It is feasible to conduct this multidisciplinary intervention in cancer patients during curative treatment. Patients and care providers were satisfied with the intervention.

Cancer Patients’ Knowledge and Acceptance of Physical Activities for Rehabilitation

“…The concept of physical exercises is well established as one of the basic components of early rehabilitation for cancer patients (2). This includes the recovering in daily life activities as walking, self-care and integration in the familiar system as well as special training programs for improving physical limitations due to disease or its therapy (3)(4)(5)(6)(7).…”

Process evaluation of a tailored work-related support intervention for patients diagnosed with gastrointestinal cancer

“…However, these reasons would have been of added value to understand the process for those who possibly already received workrelated support. Interestingly, in the study by Leensen et al [25], the majority of the patients were diagnosed with breast cancer (N = 78, 84%) compared with a minor group of colorectal cancer (N = 8, 9%). In our study, we only included patients with gastrointestinal cancer and despite the populationbased colorectal screening programme, we did not include as many as we expected.…”

“…A study by Tamminga et al [23], regarding a hospital-based intervention that was targeted at patients diagnosed with cancer, reported an inclusion rate similar to that in our study. Another hospital-based study involving occupational counselling combined with physical exercise for patients diagnosed with cancer [25] reported a higher rate of participating patients (77%).…”

“…To structure and describe those, we used the model of Linnan and Steckler [21] for structuring the process evaluation. Other RTW studies [23][24][25] also evaluated their intervention process with this model, allowing us to relate and learn from their intervention process. Furthermore, results of the effectiveness of an intervention can be put into perspective by performing a process evaluation with the individual components of the intervention process and the relation between these components [20,26].…”

Effectiveness of a Tailored Work-Related Support Intervention for Patients Diagnosed with Gastrointestinal Cancer: A Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Therefore, the work-related information should be tailored to the patients' needs and include for example; how to deal with openness about the diagnosis to colleagues and/or employer, information about the Act when patient is reporting for sickness absence, and disease-and treatment-specific factors in relation to work must be discussed [20]. There is an increasing focus on psychosocial and other forms of support, such as physical activity [5,21] for patients diagnosed with cancer in the occupational and oncological context [5,22]. Moreover, some intervention studies have focused on work-related support [23][24][25].…”