ESTRO 2025 - Abstract Book

S2189

Interdisciplinary – Education in radiation oncology

ESTRO 2025

2969

Digital Poster Results of a PPI survey and subsequent design of a prospective clinical trial into reducing patient anxiety with an additional physicist consultation. Charlie Martin Dorset Cancer Centre, University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust, Poole, United Kingdom Purpose/Objective: Identify the prevalence of patient anxiety around technical aspects of their treatment and the potential interest in an additional consultation with a member of the medical physics team. Material/Methods: A short questionnaire with the questions below was distributed to patient waiting rooms for two weeks. 1. Did you feel anxious about any technical aspect of your treatment? 2. Did you speak to the treatment staff about any questions or concerns you had? 2a. If yes was this satisfactory? 3. If it had been offered, would you have said yes to an additional appointment with a member of the medical physics team about the technical aspects of your treatment? 4. Any other comments?

Results:

A total of 41 responses were collected from patients. Only 10% of patients responded "yes" to feeling anxious about technical aspects of their care, although nearly another third responded "a bit". This may reflect the limited information around "technical aspects" provided on a short questionnaire or a higher proportion of lower-level anxiety. Published values of anxiety levels in radiotherapy patients vary, but 20% is commonly used [1]. This represents a significant proportion of patients anxious about technical aspects of their treatment and warrants further investigation. The majority of patients responded they would have said yes to an additional consultation with a medical physicist and, when tested for statistical significance, this result didn't depend on the patient's answer to anxiety around technical aspects. Conclusion: The PPI survey results indicate that many patients are potentially anxious about the technical aspects of their treatment. The majority would have said yes to an additional consultation with a member of the medical physics team. These results indicate that an investigation into a physics consultation for patients would have feasible recruitment. Consequently the RAPPORT (Reduce Anxiety for Patients with Physicist appOintments in RadioTherapy) trial, a phase II randomised clinical trial, is being set up, with recruitment planned to open in January 2025. It is hoped that that this will build on work by Atwood et al. [2], with the first investigation of the role physicists can play in reducing anxiety in the NHS.