Cancer Patients' Knowledge About Fatigue

Background: Result from an earlier study I carried out in the late 1990 showed that cancer patients were overall well informed about diagnoses, prognoses, symptoms, treatment, side-effects of treatment e.g. pain, nausea and vomiting and hair loss. Their knowledge about fatigue as a side -effect to cancer and cancer treatment was however different. Patients had minimal knowledge about fatigue and they were not prepared for this side-effect and as a result of this they did not know how to handle fatigue and fatigue was seen as a very frightening experience. As a result of the findings I wanted to carry out an intervention study, where the aims were to develop an educational programme about fatigue and to evaluate the effect of the programme. Purpose: The purpose of the project is to develop and describe a structured educational programme. The structured educational programme will serve as the intervention. The purpose is also to evaluate whether or not the structured educational programme increase the cancer patients knowledge about cancer related fatigue and to find out if increased knowledge about cancer related fatigue ease the experience of cancer related fatigue. Another purpose of the study is to investigate the connection between fatigue and other symptoms and to find out how other symptoms influence the patients experience of fatigue. The study will consist of 3 stages. * Development of structured educational programme * Implementation of structured educational programme * Evaluation of the effect of the structured educational programme Materials and methods: The study is a randomised experimental design. An intervention group and a control group, each consisting of 100 Breast Cancer patients (Stadium I or II) receiving chemotherapy or/and radiation therapy after surgery are included in the study. On a NR-scale (0-10) the patients had a fatigue score of 2,5 or more to be included in the study. The intervention is an educational package of 120 minutes x 3 over three weeks. The intervention is given in groups of 10 patients. Both groups are responding to questionnaires just before the intervention, just after the intervention and three months after finishing the intervention. The educational package consisted of basic knowledge about fatigue, and strategies or techniques for coping with fatigue.