Clinical Trial Summary
Surgery is often a central curative treatment for gastrointestinal tumors. Surgical treatment
of diagnosed cancer tumors is decided after a comprehensive assessment of the patient's
physical status, radiological assessments and after careful evaluation at the
multidisciplinary conference. Despite the careful preoperative assessment of patients for
curative surgery, the planned operation may unexpectedly need to be canceled. Of the patients
who were planned for curative resection for pancreatic cancer in 2021 in Sweden, 90% received
the intended surgery, and 10% of planned surgery was canceled. The reason for this was
disseminated cancer or locally advanced disease in which radical resection is considered
impossible to carry out. A systematic review of knowledge reveals a significant lack of
evidence regarding patient-centered research and aborted cancer surgery.
The studies in the project have different study designs and methods, and include focus group
interviews with staff, translation and validation of a questionnaire to measure care needs,
estimation of supportive care needs and patient experiences.
An improved understanding and knowledge of patients' preferences and needs is needed to
design interventions that can improve health-related quality of life. This project is
dedicated to studying patients undergoing aborted cancer surgery, with the aim of improving
the quality of care and meeting patients' care needs.
The overall objective of this research project is to:
- describe the patients experiences and assess supportive care needs following aborted
cancer gastrointestinal surgery
- increase knowledge of the healthcare professionals' experiences of aborted cancer
surgery from a multi-professional and continuum of cancer care perspective
- increase our clinical knowledge of patient preferences and healthcare professionals'
perspective to develop tailored patient-centered interventions with the goal to improve
quality of cancer care