Prehabilitation and enhanced recovery
Prehabilitation can improve quality of life and reduce treatment complications in cancer care. Integrating prehabilitation into routine HNC care poses huge challenges, due to the nature of symptoms and side-effects, a limited time-frame before the onset of treatment, and a complex care pathway. Our focus is on developing and evaluating prehabilitation and enhanced recovery interventions, to improve patients’ physical and psychological well-being. Hear more about our work here.
Patient reported measures
Information on the impact of head and neck cancer and its treatment taken from patients’ and carers’ perspectives are crucial for accurate information provision, decision-making, directing consultations, robust research end-points and informing guidelines. Our work includes developing patient-reported measures and symptom indices, re-purposing and testing existing measures for different populations and integrating them into clinical care for patient benefit. We are optimizing and evaluating mechanisms to enhance completion of measures, including digital platforms.
Support and rehabilitation
Head and neck cancer and its treatment can have a huge impact on patients’ and carers’ daily lives, affecting functions such as breathing, communication, swallowing and activity, with multiple symptoms including pain, fatigue and altered appearance. Physical, emotional, social, and financial concerns are common, impacting on quality of life, and influencing treatment.
Quality of Life
Quality of life is a fundamental consideration following the diagnosis of head and neck cancer. Its measurement as an outcome helps refine treatments. Its inclusion in clinical practice allows for targeted intervention. Individual and holistic care is enhanced through the use of the Patient Concerns Inventory and the number of concerns correlates with quality of life. Our research focus on aspects of validation, refinement, utility, implementation and dissemination.