An educational intervention for newly-diagnosed cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy

This is a prospective, randomized pilot trial of an educational intervention for newly‐diagnosed cancer patients under going radiotherapy. The trial was conducted in a relatively rural area in northwest Texas. Our hypothesis was that the intervention would reduce psychological distress. A group of 31 patients who were predicted by the Omega Screening Instrument to be at high risk for psychological distress were selected to be the subjects for this study. The patients were randomly assigned either to the intervention (n = 15) or to a control group (n = 16). The intervention was a series of three one‐hour individual sessions which gave information about radiotherapy and cancer, coping strategies, and communication skills. The sessions occurred during the second, third, and fourth weeks of each patient's radiotherapy. Psychological distress was measured with the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) at study entry, and one and three months later. We also used the Inventory of Current Concerns (ICC) to determine the specific areas of concern which were correlated with psychological distress. Knowledge gained was measured with a 15‐item multiple choice test which we developed from the factual material in the intervention and which we administered to both groups at entry, one month and three months. The intervention group's mean scores on the BSI Depression subscale fell over the three months on study, while those of the control group rose. The difference was statistically significant. However, the BSI scores overall were not different between the groups. Psychological distress in both groups was correlated most closely with Health, Existential, and Self‐Appraisal concerns on the ICC. Knowledge, as measured by the multiple choice test, did not increase in the intervention group, and there was no statistically significant difference between the scores of the intervention and control groups at any time. Since the BSI Depression scale has independent convergent validity with other measures of depression, we believe that the change in the intervention group's Depression scores could represent a meaningful effect. However, the lack of any measurable increase in knowledge suggests that any benefit of the educational intervention was probably non‐specific, resulting more from individual attention than from information gained.