DCCRP Initiatives

While spanning the continuum of cancer, all DCCRP initiatives contribute to the central purposes of improving patients’ experiences during cancer and its treatment, and of restoring the patient to an optimal level of living as quickly and fully as possible. Figure 1, below, provides a schematic diagram of DCCRP’s major spheres of activity, showing how they relate to the patient’s stage of illness. The grey shaded area represents the volume of suffering experienced by the patient.

Figure 1: Spectrum of DCCRP Initiatives 

Rationale for the DCCRP approach

DCCRP strives to conduct research that addresses – as completely as possible – the experiences of disease, health, wellness, and recovery from the patient’s perspective.  Research questions are formulated, and qualified, by important questions:  What does this disease, symptom, or intervention mean to the patient?  How is the patient experiencing his/her illness and treatment?  Does this intervention improve the patient’s quality of life, as he/she defines it?  Are we addressing all of the patient’s concerns?  How can we include family, caregivers, and loved ones, to enhance healing for all?

Patients experience cancer as continuous, not demarcated into distinct stages, and as multi-faceted, not compartmentalized into physical, social, emotional, or spiritual categories.  DCCRP therefore addresses patients’ healing, well-being, and quality of life across the cancer continuum and covers a range of strategies that, together, touch on the rich multidimensional nature of the patient’s experience.  The ultimate goal of interventions studied by DCCRP is to help the patient, as quickly and easily as possible, begin again to live life to the fullest – regardless of the duration of life remaining.

The DCCRP strategy moves from development of interventions to improvement in patient care through a series of steps that assist physicians in “translating” new evidence into meaningful changes in clinical practice.  While physicians often hear patients’ “complaints,” they typically receive this information on symptoms and experiences in a compartmentalized way; information reaches them piecemeal on patients’ tumors, pain, fatigue, co-morbidities, and other health-related issues.  DCCRP will help physicians form a coherent picture of the patient as a whole being by: (1) articulating quantifiable and recognizable categories of experience, such as physical symptoms and psychological distress; (2) developing communication strategies for conveying patients’ concerns and experiences to their physicians; and (3) identifying opportunities for intervention to help the patient overcome undesirable experiences, and patient-specific risks associated with those interventions.  Current collaborative work involves the delineation of specific strategies for individualizing patient care including biopsychosocial risk profiling, quantifying level of need, and comprehensively encompassing patient and family concerns within the medical care plan.