| Abstract: |
(from the chapter) The challenges that cancer patients are likely to face are intuitively apparent. Large-scale research studies have repeatedly demonstrated the complex distress that cancer patients encounter across their illness trajectory. Despite these findings, cancer settings are slow to appreciate the deleterious effect of distress and other unmet needs on patients. Since distress has been identified as the sixth vital sign, there has been an exponential growth of attention to the implementation of screening for distress as a standard practice in cancer care. Distress screening, as it has now grown into a full biopsychosocial initiative, has the potential to become the connective tissue of healthcare systems around the world. Currently, these systems are fragmented and inefficient. This is truly a time of growth and maturation for the field of psychosocial oncology as we create a true science of caring led by clinicians, educators, researchers, and other compassionate experts committed to humanizing the cancer experience.' As an international symbol for improving psychosocial care, distress as the sixth vital sign is increasingly speaking a universal language understood by healthcare professionals, patients, and families in a voice of partnership and strength. In the end, we should recognize, as did Niccolo Machiavelli in his famous work. The Prince, that "there is nothing more difficult to take in hand than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." And so, with the growth and development of comprehensive interdisciplinary cancer care, screening for distress as the sixth vital signs is one of the drivers of such change. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved). |
