Experiences of Cancer Patients

Running head: NURSING ASSIGNMENT
Experience of people with cancer during treatment
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1NURSING ASSIGNMENT
Introduction- The word cancer is an umbrella term that encompasses several diseases,
characterized by an abnormal proliferation and growth of cells present in the body, which in
turn increases their potential of spreading to, or invading other regions of the body (Marcu et
al. 2019). According to Weis et al. (2017) physical effect of cancer and its treatment has been
found to deteriorate the health related quality of life of patients, and also creates a negative
impact on their emotional functioning. Patients who experience physical symptoms like
nausea, fatigue, and pain are also subjected to emotional distress. Bandura (2017) also
identified the need of offering psychotherapeutic treatment for all cancer patients owing to
the prevalence of helplessness among cancer patients who are affected both emotionally and
physically. Thus, cancer predisposes the patients to several emotional conflicts. Genetic
analysis for hereditary cancer disposition has progressed speedily in recent years with the
detection of novel genes. Recent workshops conducted by the UK Cancer Genetics Group
helped in the development of management proposals for screening patients across the nation,
who were found to manifest pathogenic mutations in the cancer causing genes (Taylor et al.
2018). This assignment will discuss scholarly articles for exploring the experiences that
cancer patients acquire, during their treatment.
Literature search and findings- Search strategy forms an essential aspect of literature
reviews and comprise of an organized structure encompassing key terms that are fed in
electronic databases. These help in extracting relevant articles. The research question for the
current assignment was as follows:
What are the experiences of patients suffering from cancer, during their treatment?
Relevant scholarly pieces of evidence were obtained from three electronic databases
namely, CINAHL, MEDLINE, and Ovid MEDLINE ALL. To offer a literature synthesis
pertinent to contemporary cancer care and its experiences, the search of articles was restricted

2NURSING ASSIGNMENT
to those published from January 2017 to February 2019. The search terms were ‘cancer’,
‘tumour’, ‘patient’, ‘experience’, ‘feelings’, and ‘survivors’. These terms were combined
with boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT that either broadened or narrowed down the
extracted hits (Martin, Hussain and Boyle 2017). The search focused on articles that included
all people suffering from cancer (excluding those aged within four years, since they are not
quite capable of expressing their experiences). Articles that focused on patients suffering
from all kinds of cancer were taken into consideration, regardless of cancer stage, type, co-
morbidty, and severity). 20 articles had been extracted from the database. The search results
are given below:
Database Total hits Sources used
CINAHL 32 9
MEDLINE 27 7
Ovid MEDLINE ALL 24 4
Total 83 20
Table 1- Database search hits

3NURSING ASSIGNMENT
References
Research articles
Abdollahimohammad, A., Firouzkouhi, M. and Naderifar, M., 2018. Lived Experiences of
Iranian Cancer Patients After Survival: A Phenomenological Research. Journal of Patient
Experience, pp.1-5.
Aoki, T. and Inoue, M., 2017. Primary care patient experience and cancer screening uptake
among women: an exploratory cross-sectional study in a Japanese population. Asia Pacific
family medicine, 16(1), p.3.
Bolton, G. and Isaacs, A., 2018. Women’s experiences of cancer-related cognitive
impairment, its impact on daily life and care received for it following treatment for breast
cancer. Psychology, health & medicine, 23(10), pp.1261-1274.
Carduff, E., Kendall, M. and Murray, S.A., 2018. Living and dying with metastatic bowel
cancer: Serial in‐depth interviews with patients. European journal of cancer care, 27(1),
p.e12653.
Carrera, P.M., Kantarjian, H.M. and Blinder, V.S., 2018. The financial burden and distress of
patients with cancer: Understanding and stepping‐up action on the financial toxicity of cancer
treatment. CA: a cancer journal for clinicians, 68(2), pp.153-165.
Faller, H., Weis, J., Koch, U., Brähler, E., Härter, M., Keller, M., Schulz, H., Wegscheider,
K., Boehncke, A., Hund, B. and Reuter, K., 2017. Utilization of professional psychological
care in a large German sample of cancer patients. Psycho‐oncology, 26(4), pp.537-543.
Fish, J. and Williamson, I., 2018. Exploring lesbian, gay and bisexual patients’ accounts of
their experiences of cancer care in the UK. European journal of cancer care, 27(1),
p.e12501.