Identifying supportive and palliative care needs in people with a recent diagnosis of thoracic cancer: acceptability of the SPARC questionnaire

National guidelines recommend that physical, psychological, social, spiritual and financial support needs are routinely assessed in people with lung cancer, as a minimum, around the time of diagnosis, on completion of primary treatment, when there is significant deterioration of symptoms and when dying is diagnosed. 1 2 Self-assessment is considered a useful part of the process and several tools have been highlighted. 3 One of these, the Sheffield Profile for Assessment and Referral to Care (SPARC), contains 45 questions with 56 possible responses covering seven areas of potential need. 4 For most questions, patients rate the degree to which they have been distressed or bothered by a symptom or issue in the past month using the responses: 0 'Not at all', 1 'A little bit', 2 'Quite a bit' and 3 'Very much'. Of those approached, 86% agreed to take part, with data from 100 patients analysed (63 male; mean (SD) age 68 (9) years; non-small cell lung cancer 70, small cell lung cancer 20, mesothelioma 10; all Caucasian, with English as the first language in 98).