A patient consensus for research in supportive care in French cancer care centers: The CyPRES project

In oncology, supportive care should be used along with curative treatment or palliative care in order to improve patients' health-related quality of life, overall survival, and to better support treatment side effects as well as the disease evolution. Unfortunately, they are not widely used in clinical practice. A direct assessment of the needs perceived as unmet by patients could help to assess the magnitude of expectations to better target treatments as an example. A prospective assessment of the expectations and needs of the patients is thus essential. This would also help to highlight the convergence between the supportive care proposed and used and that expected by patients. The first step to understanding how to optimize the use of resources and to improve the quality of care is to identify patient's expectations. Moreover, it is now well recognized that patients should play a key role in research and that their active participation in research can increase the relevance of the research. In this context, the CyPRES project aims to: 1) assess through national consensus, patients' expectations in terms of supportive care in order to help both clinicians and health care services; 2) prioritize patients' expectations and arrange resources according to the priority needs identified; 3) identify supportive care for which no previous research (evidence-based medicine) has demonstrated their usefulness. A randomized clinical trial will thus be proposed; 4) involve patients in the writing, conduct, and analyses, as well as communications of the randomized clinical trial. Using two questionnaires sequentially administered through a modified DELPHI consensus method with RAND scoring, supportive care considered as priority to patients will be identified.