Abstract
Background: Advanced cancer patients experience considerable symptoms, problems, and needs. Early referral of these patients to specialised palliative care (SPC) could improve their symptoms and problems.The Danish Palliative Care Trial (DanPaCT) investigates whether patients with metastatic cancer, who report palliative needs in a screening, will benefit from being referred to 'early SPC'. Methods/Design. DanPaCT is a clinical, multicentre, parallel-group superiority trial with balanced randomisation (1:1). The planned sample size is 300 patients. Patients are randomised to specialised palliative care (SPC) plus standard treatment versus standard treatment. Consecutive patients from oncology departments are screened for palliative needs with a questionnaire if they: a) have metastatic cancer; b) are 18 years or above; and c) have no prior contact with SPC. Patients with palliative needs (i.e. symptoms/problems exceeding a certain threshold) according to the questionnaire are eligible. The primary outcome is the change in the patients' primary need (the most severe symptom/problem measured with the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer Quality of Life Questionnaire (EORTC QLQ-C30)). Secondary outcomes are other symptoms/problems (EORTC QLQ-C30), satisfaction with health care (FAMCARE P-16), anxiety and depression (the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale), survival, and health care costs. Discussion. Only few trials have investigated the effects of SPC. To our knowledge DanPaCT is the first trial to investigate screening based 'early SPC' for patients with a broad spectrum of cancer diagnosis. Trial registration. Current controlled Trials NCT01348048.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 37 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | BMC Palliative Care |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 24 Oct 2013 |
Bibliographical note
FundingThis work was funded by The Danish foundation TrygFonden [journal number 7-10-0838A] and the Danish Cancer Society [journal number R16-A695].
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the following project nurses for collecting the data: Agnethe Fløe Nielsen and Sine Jürgensen Stamm Mikkelsen, Aarhus University Hospital; Lone Thorup Røge and Grethe Christensen, Herning Sygehus; Berit Schmidt Bigum and Kristina Olesen, Vejle Sygehus; Kirsten Rasmussen, Line Haslund and Merethe Martin, Odense University Hospital; and Katrine Eldrup, Helena Lindholm, Louise Christoffersen and Lisbeth Grave Bendixen, Copenhagen University Hospital (Rigshospitalet). Furthermore, we wish to thank the palliative care teams for participating in the trial. Last, but not least, we wish to thank the patients for their participation.
Keywords
- Advanced cancer
- Cost-effectiveness
- End-of-life care
- Needs assessment
- Palliative care
- Patient satisfaction
- Quality of life
- Randomised clinical trial
- Study protocol
Access to Document
- A randomised, multicentre clinical trial of specialised palliative care plus standard treatment versus standard treatment alone for cancer patients with palliative care needs: the Danish palliative care trial (DanPaCT) protocol
© 2013 Johnsen et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.