Publication:

Knowledge and attitudes of patients with gynaecologic cancer on palliative care in a low-middle income region

Background Palliative care improves the symptom burden of women with gynecologic malignancies either when they are admitted or treated in an outpatient. This study aims to evaluate the knowledge and attitudes of gynecologic cancer patients regarding palliative care, with the potential to identify barriers to delivering high-quality palliative care services. The results may be used by policymakers in developing strategies for the delivery of effective palliative care services.

Methods This is a cross-sectional study design using a validated, self-administered questionnaire. Level of knowledge of the respondents was determined based on the number of correct responses. Attitude of the respondents was assessed using a 5-item Likert scale with its corresponding descriptive equivalent and computation of weighted means. The association between patients’ knowledge and attitude were determined using Pearson’s moment correlation coefficient.

Results Between July and December 2020, a total of 67 patients participated in this study. The mean score of the participants’ knowledge was 8.78 (67%) which is of adequate knowledge. The majority of the participants’ computed weighted mean for attitude ranges from 3.31 to 3.52 which indicates appropriate attitude. Most participants responded correctly about the goals of palliative care that it would address any psychological issues (83.58 %) and stress (77.61%) brought up by serious illness and it can help the patients in dealing with the side effects of their medical treatments (82.09%). Unfortunately, more than half of the participants (62.69%) believed that palliative care is specifically for cancer patients and half of them (50.75%) responded that patients must be in the hospital to receive palliative care. The study also showed that the knowledge of the respondents is not correlated with appropriate attitude (p-value>0.05).

Conclusions This study shows that gynecologic cancer patients have a good level of knowledge of palliative care and have a generally positive attitude toward accepting palliative care. No significant correlation between knowledge and attitudes was established in this study.