A qualitative assessment of the supportive care and resource needs of patients undergoing craniotomy for benign brain tumours.

purposeAs past literature has focused on support needs of patients with malignant brain tumours, the support needs of patients with benign brain tumours have largely been overlooked. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the supportive care and resource needs of patients undergoing craniotomy for benign brain tumours.

methodsIndividual, semi-structured interviews were conducted with patients who had undergone craniotomy for a benign brain tumour within the past 2 years. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, anonymized and subjected to descriptive thematic analysis by multiple investigators in the grounded theory tradition.

resultsTwenty-nine patients (20 women, 20-88 years of age) with World Health Organization grade I brain tumours (25 meningioma) were interviewed. Five overarching themes emerged: (1) need for formal support from diagnosis onwards; (2) complexity of supportive needs during postoperative recovery; (3) importance of regular long-term monitoring by physicians; (4) influence of psychosocial factors on supportive needs; and (5) existence of barriers to equal access to available supports.

conclusionsPatients' supportive care needs are temporally dependent on disease course and treatment, and modifiable by demographic and psychosocial factors. Findings of this study show that patients with benign tumours lacked but needed many supportive care resources currently available to cancer patients. Many of the potential solutions to this current gap in supportive care involve extending support resources already available for cancer patients to patients with benign brain tumours. We thus suggest recommendations to improve service gaps and reduce disparities in supportive care for patients with benign brain tumours.