Oncologist-Patient Communication Patterns in Advanced Cancer Consultations

Sixteen audio-recorded consultations between patients with advanced cancer and their medical oncologists form the basis of this qualitative observational study. The data was collected by Daisy J.M. Ermers from January to March 2019 at a Dutch tertiary referral center. It analyzes communication themes that influence shared decision-making.

Use Cases

• Analyze the 'balancing between hope and realism' theme to model oncologist communication strategies.
• Identify instances of the 'little room for bad news' theme to assess emotional content handling.
• Code consultations for the 'medical perspective is leading' theme to quantify physician-dominated dialogue.
• Examine the 'shared focus on anticancer treatment' theme to understand patient-oncologist alignment on therapy options.
• Use reflexive thematic analysis categories to train NLP models for detecting specific communication patterns in clinical transcripts.

Strengths

• Data is derived from 16 real-world clinical consultations, providing authentic interaction records.
• Clear temporal boundary with data collected over a focused 3-month period from January to March 2019.
• Analysis produced four distinct, named themes characterizing communication patterns.

Limitations

• The dataset is very small, with only 16 consultation records, limiting statistical generalizability.
• Geographic scope is limited to a single Dutch tertiary referral center, which may not reflect other healthcare cultures.
• As a qualitative thematic analysis, the underlying raw data (audio/transcripts) may not be fully included in the 13.5 KB XLS file.

Provenance

Source

Daisy J.M. Ermers

Collection Method

Qualitative observational study using audio recordings and reflexive thematic analysis.

Time Range

January to March 2019

Freshness

null

Geography

A Dutch tertiary referral center