‘Cancer patients attending treatment during COVID-19: intolerance of uncertainty and psychological distress’ Brief Review

Being that there’s no country specified in this article, it’s not exactly of massive use for me. However, a lot of the information found in the piece was fairly contrarian to the other conclusions drawn from other papers focusing on cancer patients during COVID-19.

Firstly, the fact that most attended a majority of their treatment sessions during COVID-19 was a bit of a revelation. It’s great to know that despite widespread fear during the period, most patients were still willing to take risks to receive proper treatment. Furthermore, the fact that the level of psychological distress was “markedly low” was a very interesting proposition. However, the fact that the surveys were taken three to eight months after the initial COVID-19 proclamations make the information a bit more understandable. Likewise, the fact that perceived social support only mildly decreased is much more understandable when considering the time period. Rather than “during COVID-19” being immediately after COVID-19’s introduction to the world, the fact that surveys were taken during what I consider to be closer to the second phase of COVID-19 makes things more reasonable.

I really did appreciate the conclusion drawn, that being that it’s extremely important to both solve the problem at hand and build better systems to compensate for similar problems in the future. There was an article that I reviewed earlier that focused only on solving the problems brought about by COVID-19, but in that article, too, I expressed my concern about minimizing the effect of such events in the future as well.

The only reference I will be focusing on is Understanding the psychological impact of COVID-19 pandemic on patients with cancer, their caregivers, and health care workers in Singapore. I’m a bit more selective in the articles I’ll be analyzing in the future, really only looking for articles focused on specific countries.