Patient-Centered Communication in Cancer Care: Promoting Healing, Reducing Suffering

This book contains information about a proposed conceptual framework and description of the state of the science in patient-centered communication, noting several gaps in the research and the need to improve and diversify study designs and methods. This contains author's thoughtful analysis that challenges the research community to undertake more ambitious studies of communication processes that address the temporal and contextual complexities of cancer care over the course of treatment and survivorship. This will require the development and use of more sophisticated measurement and analysis techniques, and NCI remains committed to supporting this essential work. Understanding how to optimize the communication process between patients/family and the health care delivery team is essential to the goal of reducing the burden of cancer.