Expression and Management of Emotional Distress of Head and Neck Cancer Patients during Clinical Consultations

The experience of diagnosis and treatment for patients with head and neck cancer is often distressing with high levels of physical, functional, emotional, treatment-related and social impacts requiring careful attention and management by the clinical team. Tools to assess distress are based, almost solely, on self-report, and these have an important place in giving clinicians a relative understanding of the patient’s profile of discomfort, anxiety and mood. The direct observation of emotional expression in face-to-face interactions between patient and clinical team member are now available in the form of the Verona Coding Definitions of Emotional Sequences. In addition, the parallel system classifying the responses of the clinician is available to plot clinician management of emotions expressed by patients in clinic interactions. Initial studies indicate that the range of responses that the clinical team can employ are varied and have implications for patient outcome. Some of emotions that are expressed by patients are ‘hidden’ and not made explicit. Clinicians have a powerful set of techniques available to them to assist patients make sense of the parallel emotional reactions to the stages of recovery from, often, radical treatments. Gerry Humphris1,3, Simon N Rogers2 and Yuefang Zhou3* 1Edinburgh Cancer Centre, The Western General Hospital, UK 2Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery, Aintree University Hospital, UK 3School of Medicine, University of St Andrews, UK *Corresponding author: Yuefang Zhou, School of Medicine, University of St Andrews, UK, Tel: +44 1334 461866; Fax: +44 1334 467470; Email: [email protected] Published Date:July 25, 2016 Gr up SM