SureCan study: Survivors' Rehabilitation Evaluation after Cancer; 2018-2022+ Taylor, Chalder

The SURECAN study (Survivors’ Rehabilitation Evaluation after Cancer) is a programme grant funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) under the prestigious Programme Grants for Applied Research funding stream. The SURECAN programme consists of six inter-digitating work streams designed to develop, trial and evaluate the ACT+ intervention in improving the quality of life for those living with cancer. The work packages are as follows:

• Meta-synthesis of qualitative studies of cultural influences on psychological interventions in survivors (April 2018 to April 2019).

• Development of Acceptance and Commitment (plus) therapy (ACT+) pre-pilot (April 2018 to December 2019).

• Pilot randomised controlled trial (RCT) (March 2021 until July 2021)

• Main RCT of ACT+ versus usual aftercare (July 2021 to June 2022).

• Qualitative studies

• Evaluation of predictors, moderators and mediators

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https://surecanstudy.qmul.ac.uk/about-us-study/

 

SureCan FFS!

 

Here we go again with the "cost-effectiveness".

Edit: sometimes they sound like a startup company.

 

Haven't the cancer survivors suffered enough?

 

And the copy-paste research copies and pastes on.

It's really galling for these people to keep talking about their right to continue doing whatever research they want when all they do is the exact same stuff over and over again. Even more galling is that no one objects, as if the field had completely lost the ability to self-reflect on what it does and place limits on things that are obviously incompatible with reality.

Because the opportunity cost of pushing for this sham nonsense is enormous. Think of all the credible research that can't be done because funding goes to stuff like that, the same stuff, over and over again for decades, only ever different by adding a new layer of transparent packaging.

 

This is so patronising and awful. Poor cancer survivors, as if they don't already have enough awfulness to deal with.

Exactly this. Starting with ME/CFS and now, it seems, moving on to just about every other illness under the sun. I guess Chalder & co finally twigged that their heyday of inflicting charlatanry on ME/CFS sufferers is fizzling out, so now they want to inflict themselves on other diseases as well.

 

Somebody should issue an executive order banning these annoying smartass trial acronyms. On the other hand, they are kind of a useful heuristic in filtering out stupid research without having to even read the abstract.

 

it must be nice having clueless friends who are happy to waste taxpayers money on the endless zero benefit pseudo research that these clowns do .

 

Evaluating an interactive acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) workshop delivered to trained therapists working with cancer patients in the United Kingdom: a mixed methods approach
Abstract
Background: SURECAN (SUrvivors' Rehabilitation Evaluation after CANcer) is a multi-phase study developing and evaluating an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) intervention integrated with exercise and work when highly valued (thus we called the intervention ACT+), for people who have completed treatment for cancer but who have low quality of life. We developed a training programme for therapists working in different psychological services to be delivered over 2-3 days. Our aim was to evaluate the extent to which the training could improve therapists' knowledge and confidence to deliver ACT+ to cancer patients in a trial setting.

Methods: Three interactive workshops were delivered to 29 therapists from three clinical settings in London and in Sheffield. A mixed-methods approach was used. Questionnaires were designed to assess knowledge and confidence in using ACT+ with people who have low quality of life after cancer treatment. They were self-administered immediately prior to and after each workshop. Open text-based questions were used to elicit feedback about the workshops alongside a satisfaction scale. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of therapists (n = 12) to explore their views about the training more deeply, and how it might be optimised.

Results: Quantitative analysis showed that knowledge of ACT, as well as confidence in using the ACT+ intervention in this setting increased significantly after training (28.6 and 33.5% increase in the median score respectively). Qualitative analysis indicated that most therapists were satisfied with the content and structure of the programme, valued the rich resources provided and enjoyed the practice-based approach. Potential barriers/facilitators to participation in the trial and to the successful implementation of ACT+ were identified. For some therapists, delivering a manualised intervention, as well as supporting exercise- and work-related goals as non-specialists was seen as challenging. At the same time, therapists valued the opportunity to be involved in research, whilst training in a new therapy model.

Conclusions: Training can effectively improve the knowledge and confidence of therapists from different clinical backgrounds to deliver a modified ACT intervention to cancer patients in a trial setting.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35698089/

full paper also available here:
https://bmccancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12885-022-09745-4

 

So if you train people about the humours, or astrology, or anything really, you can then conclude that you can do that. Good stuff. Powerful.

The worst part is that there are hundreds of "studies" like this. Psychology makes many baseless affirmations, but somehow they still need to "test" whether it's possible to teach people things. Amazing.