'No turning back’ Psycho-oncology in the time of COVID-19: Insights from a survey of UK professionals

Abstract

Key points

• To gain insight on UK professionals' experiences and views of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on psycho-oncology activity, the British Psychosocial Oncology Society (BPOS) conducted an online survey of members and UK colleagues
• Qualitative data from 94 respondents were analysed thematically. Key themes were summarised using the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) framework
• Professionals reported severe disruptions in delivering clinical and supportive care to people affected by cancer and associated research activity. There were major concerns that the full impact of the pandemic is yet to be realised.
• In both care and research settings, the pandemic has also been an impetus for positive changes in working practices, technology adoption, reducing process barriers and fostering collaborations which has to potential to be sustained.
• To mitigate ongoing challenges, is it vital that cancer organisations work together to adapt and promote psycho-oncology activity to maximise benefit for patients and professionals in the longer-term.

Rights

© 2020 The Authors. Psycho‐Oncology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1002/pon.5486

Repository URI

https://aura.abdn.ac.uk/handle/2164/15139