March 20-22 2015: What Matters to Patients and Doctors in the Use of Radiation Therapy?

The March 2015 #RadOnc journal club will be discussing the article:

Factors influencing the use of RT in NSW: a qualitative study exploring consumer and health professional perspectives.

This study is a report on several focus groups with interviews of 56 patients, caregivers and health professionals to obtain an in-depth understanding of what factors were most important in the use of radiation therapy in New South Wales, Australia. What matters to make radiation therapy worthwhile?

Follow Dr. Puma Sundaresan, the lead author, at @sundap15

We start asynchronous discussion Friday March 20^th – Sunday March 22^nd , with the live hour 8-9 PM Central Standard Time.

We will be joined by lead author Dr. Puma Sundaresan of the Royal Prince Albert Hospital and Gosford Hospital. You can follow her on Twitter for the discussion.

Here are the topics we’ll be covering:

T1: What is the role of radiation therapy in cancer care in Australia?

T2a: Why use focus groups to study reasons for radiation use?

T2b: What was the format for discussion and recording results?

T3a: What were the most important factors on radiation use for patients? For professionals?

T3b: What are the strengths and limitations of this study?

T4: What are future directions for continued research?

We are hoping to make this article will be free and open access from now through the entire chat. Stay tuned!

Thanks to Sandra Turner, David Ball and JMIRO, the article is now free for the journal club! Here is the link:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1754-9485.12198/epdf

Please join us!