A study to develop a toolkit to help people manage their cancer pain (SMARTE)

The research team were able to develop and test a toolkit they think will be useful for people with pain caused by advancer cancer.

They recruited people from 2014 to 2016, and published the results in 2017.

Part 1
The research team looked at research and information that was already available, and talked to 6 patients and their carers. They came up with a list of 5 main issues people needed support with. These included patient’s individual concerns, how to talk to doctors and nurses about pain, information about how pain medicines work and issues for carers.

Part 2
The research team did interviews and focus groups with 15 patients, 4 carers and 19 health care professionals. They discussed the findings from part 1 in more detail and developed the toolkit for people to use.

The toolkit included:

• 8 plain English factsheets which included information and advice about pain, medicines and managing side effects
• 2 podcast films to watch
• a pain diary
• medicine charts to record when to take medicines
• a goal setting worksheet

Part 3
The research team recruited 19 people to test the toolkit they had developed. They trained 12 nurses to help people use the toolkit.  They also measured people’s quality of life and level of pain before giving them the toolkit and for up to 6 weeks afterwards.

The results showed that the health care professionals and patients found the different parts of the toolkit helpful. Patients reported that the information helped them address their fears, and encouraged them to ask for more information if they needed it.

There wasn’t much change in pain levels or quality of life for the people taking part. But that could be partly because they had advanced cancer and were becoming more unwell. Pain can stop people doing their usual day to day things. Some people taking part found this happened less once they had used the toolkit.

The research team found it wasn’t very expensive to help people use the toolkit, so felt it was cost effective.

Conclusion
The research team concluded that it’s possible to use this toolkit for people with pain caused by advanced cancer. They suggest that it is looked at in more detail with a larger group of patients.

We have based this summary on information from the research team. The information they sent us has been reviewed by independent specialists (peer reviewed ) and published in a medical journal. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team who did the research. We have not analysed the data ourselves.