Background: The incidence of head and neck cancer is increasing slightly. Head and neck cancer but also itââ?¬â?¢s\nnecessary and often successful treatment may affect general domains of health-related quality of life and provoke a\nvariety of adverse symptoms and side effects, both during and after treatment. The objective of this study was to\ncompare a person-centred care intervention in terms of health-related quality of life, disease-specific symptoms or\nproblems, with traditional care as a control group for patients with head and neck cancer.\nMethods: In this randomized controlled trial, personââ?¬â??centred-care intervention and traditional care (control) groups\ncomprised 54 and 42 patients, respectively. Outcome measures used were: the EORTC QLQ-C30 and the EORTC\nQLQ-C35. Both groups answered the questionnaires at baseline and after 4, 10, 18 and 52 weeks from start of\ntreatment. The questionnairesââ?¬â?¢ scores were compared between groups by using independent samples test and\nnon-parametric test for continuous variables. For categorical data, Fisherââ?¬â?¢s exact test was used. Longitudinal data\nwere analysed using generalized linear models for normally distributed repeated measures data.\nResults: At baseline, the intervention and control groups were comparable in terms of medical and sociodemographic\nvariables, clinical characteristics, health-related quality of life and disease-specific symptoms or problems. At all the\nfollow-up points, even during the worst period for the patients, the person-centred-care group consistently reported\nbetter scores than the control group. The differences were numerically but not always statistically significant. When\ntesting longitudinal data, statistically significant results were found for head and neck cancer-specific problems,\nswallowing (p = 0.014), social eating (p = 0.048) and feeling ill (p = 0.021).\nConclusions: The results from this study suggest that adopting the person-centred-care concept practiced here could\nbe a way to improve function and wellbeing in patients with head and neck cancer.
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