Identifying the psychosocial needs of individuals with cancer

The diagnosis and treatment of cancer creates psychosocial needs that patients often find difficult to resolve. Because most need assessments do not reach beyond enumerating needs to examine barriers to needs resolution, existing social supports or patients' service preferences, we set out to develop a needs assessment inventory to meet these objectives. The first step was to identify need categories using a qualitative methodology. The aims of the research presented in this paper are to: (a) compare patients' and professional caregivers' identification of patients' psychosocial needs, (b) establish categories of psychosocial needs, and (c) verify the categories resulting from the analysis of the data. Twenty-seven need categories were identified. There was a lack of congruency between patients and hospital caregivers and between caregivers at the two cancer centres in the frequencies with which the need categories were cited. The incongruence underscores the importance of gathering information from more than one perspective.