A comparative investigation of clients' attitudes toward breaking bad news to patients with cancer

Truth disclosure is one of the major challenges for physicians with cancer patients. The attitude toward breaking news adopted by individuals depends on their cultural background. The present study was conducted at Ardabil University of Medical sciences, Ardabil, Iran, to investigate the attitudes of Turkish-speaking patients with cancer and their families to the disclosure of bad news.

The present descriptive cross-sectional study used convenience sampling to select 62 patients, 76 family members of young and 58 children. The mean age of the patients was 37.29 years, and their majorities were 32-42 years old. The data were collected using the questionnaire proposed by Managheb et al., which included six dimensions, i.e., suitability of the person, suitability of the time, the place, factors affecting the delivery of bad news, amount of disclosed information, and acceptance.

Despite the insignificant differences in the total score of attitude between the groups (P=0.23), significant differences were found in terms of suitability of the time (P=0.017) and affecting factors (P=0.007) between children's families. Also, in parents of children, employment made truth acceptance better (p=0.04). The acuteness of the disease increased the total attitude score in all the participants (P=0.047). Significant relationships were also observed between age and accepting truth (P=0.045), male gender and place of disclosing the truth (P=0.004), male gender and amount of disclosed information (P=0.043), as well as owning a house and accepting truth (P=0.002). Moreover, education was negatively related to the person for truth disclosing (P=0.036) and factors affecting the truth disclosing (P=0.015).

There are different circumstances and economic impacts in children's families on their tolerance. Given the difficulty of disclosing the truth to the employee and highly-educated individuals, it is recommended that health workers consider individual conditions in these circumstances.