Perceiving hope from oncologists and prognostic understanding and treatment planning.

21Background: Offering hope during prognostic discussions is widely considered essential to the delivery of humane medical care. However, clinicians always offering hope may undermine realism in patients' prognostic understanding and preparation for what lies ahead. We examine how patients’ perceptions of their oncologists as always offering hope, compared to a more tempered sense of hope, relate to prognostic understanding and treatment planning. Methods: Data came from post-scan baseline assessments of an NCI funded multi-site study on prognostic communication among metastatic cancer patients’ refractory to at least one chemotherapy regimen. The analytic sample consisted of 235 participants, who during structured interviews, rated the question, “how often does your oncologist offer hope,” as “always,” “most of the time” or “sometimes.” A binary variable was created comparing participants endorsing “always” to participants endorsing “most of the time” or “sometimes.” Patients also reported on elements of...