PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Objective:
Surrogate information seeking is quite common, and several studies have presented data on caregivers, family members, and friends who seek health information on the Internet or from a cancer‐information service (CIS) on behalf of cancer patients. However, these studies provide little information about the patients who are supported by surrogate seekers. Therefore, this study analyzed demographic and cancer‐related differences, including diverse informational needs, between self‐seeking patients and patients who benefited from surrogate seekers (ie, caregivers, family, or friends) requesting information on their behalf.
Methods:
We conducted a retrospective audit of phone and e‐mail inquiries to a German CIS between January and December 2016 from self‐seeking patients (n = 13 723) and surrogate information seekers, as well as the corresponding supported patients (n = 6696).
Results:
Supported patients were more likely to be males (P < 0.001), older than self‐seeking patients (P < 0.001), and older than the corresponding surrogate seekers (P < 0.001). They were also more likely to be in the diagnostic or palliative stage (P < 0.001) and were less likely to suffer from breast cancer or prostate cancer (P < 0.001) than self‐seeking patients. There were significant differences in the CIS requests of self‐seekers and surrogate seekers.
Conclusions:
The results point to different support needs of self‐seekers and surrogate seekers. Thus, surrogate seekers and their corresponding supported patients should be seen as a separate target group to self‐seeking patients, with the former requiring informational and emotional support on diverging topics and at different disease stages.