Involve. Supporting you. Supporting your patients with cancer
As a healthcare provider managing patients with cancer, you know first-hand the value of clinical trials in helping develop new approaches to preventing, screening for, diagnosing, and treating disease. These trials, and the participation of patients, are what help make advances in care possible. Encouraging your patients to take part in clinical trials may benefit them in multiple ways:
- Trial participants have access to investigational approaches that often are not otherwise available.
- The approach being studied may be more effective than the standard approach, and participants may be the first to benefit from the new method or therapy being investigated.
- Trial participants receive regular medical attention from a comprehensive research team of dedicated healthcare professionals.
Additionally, you can emphasize to your patients that, while they themselves may benefit by taking part in clinical trials, their participation also provides them the opportunity to help others in the future. To learn more about clinical trials, visit: www.cancer.gov.
Compassionate Use or Expanded Access Trial
As much as some patients want to participate in clinical trials, sometimes they don't meet the inclusion criteria. When this happens, As a healthcare provider, you can help your patients by suggesting they pursue participation through what's known as a compassionate use trial. Compassionate use is a way to provide an investigational treatment to a patient who is not eligible to receive that therapy in a clinical trial, but who has a serious or life-threatening illness for which other treatments are not available. According to the National Cancer Institute, "Compassionate use trials allow patients to receive promising but not yet fully studied or approved cancer therapies when no other treatment option exists." As you work to do all you can to provide the highest level of care for your patients with cancer, encouraging them to participate in clinical trials, and knowing about compassionate use if they need this option, is very important.
Browse some of the Key Clinical Trial Terminology.