A British study of about 200 patients undergoing chemotherapy showed that most of the time health care professionals didn’t offer website
recommendations unless patients asked for them.
Patients don’t get the information they’d like
Half of the people surveyed say they did receive information online about treatment, but 81 percent of those said their health care professionals
“rarely recommended websites.”
Many of the patients surveyed said they “needed further guidance” after receiving information online, but most didn’t have a chance to discuss their
questions with health professionals.
The study also showed that more than half of the patients receiving internet chemotherapy information said they needed further guidance and wanted to
have the opportunity for discussion with health professionals. But most did not have the opportunity to do so.
"Health professionals need to determine what information patients are most interested in and how they can offer guidance to credible websites,” says
study author Elaine Davies of Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust.
"It's undeniable that reliable information can improve patients' understanding of chemotherapy and can be a good way of tailoring consultations to address the
individual needs of a patient."
CancerHelp UK
is one place people in Great Britain can get answers. Liz Woolf, head of CancerHelp UK, says the information is “easy to access, written in simple
language, peer-reviewed by cancer experts and allows patients to take in information at their own pace.”
Check out these chemo resources
Here are a few more online chemotherapy resources we found:
Some patients don’t consult available resources
Do patients prefer to read paper? Maybe, says the American Medical Association.
At Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, researchers found patients who were given paper-based information on colorectal screening reviewed it more
frequently (42 percent of patients) than those who had access to online information (only 24.6 percent).
The study included almost 400 women older than 50 given colorectal cancer intervention information after routine obstetrics/gynecology follow-up
appointments.
About a third of the women got log-in information for a website, while the others got printed information in the mail. Those who did log in to the
website usually only went their once, and were more likely to visit it if they were younger. More than 30 percent of the women who received the printed
material, however, said they reviewed it at least twice.
The Amednews.com article says that a 2011 Pew Internet & American Life
Project report showed 80 percent of Internet users look up health information online.
The researchers in this study contend that “patients aren't guaranteed to use resources just because they're online.”
Linda Fleisher, MPH, PhD, assistant vice president of the Office of Health Communications and Health Disparities at Fox Chase, says the researchers
were “very surprised” by the results. She says it doesn’t mean doctors should assume patients will use online tools.
The researchers say more research is necessary to know whether “one tool is more engaging than another, or whether there are characteristics of certain
patients that make them more likely to use online tools,” so, for now, “physicians still should assume a primary role in patient education.”