Socioeconomic Deprivation Correlates With Incomplete Radiotherapy Treatment in Head and Neck Cancer.

Unlabelled: There is a high burden of socioeconomic deprivation across Merseyside and, along with this, poorer cancer outcomes. The incidence of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) within this region is higher than the national average and there are often additional complexities to individual treatment pathways such as poor health literacy, lack of social support and transport options which can impact on adherence to prescribed treatments.

Aims: This work aims to understand the impact of deprivation on patients diagnosed with HNSCC undergoing chemoradiotherapy (CRT) or radiotherapy (RT) treatment by identifying barriers to adherence.

A comparison of three methods to generate a conceptual understanding of a disease based on the patients' perspective.

Background: The Food and Drug Administration patient-reported outcome (PRO) guidance provides standards for PRO development, but these standards bring scientific and logistical challenges which can result in a lengthy and expensive instrument development process. Thus, more pragmatic methods are needed alongside traditional approaches.

Methods: Partnering with the National Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) Society, we compared three methods for eliciting patient experiences: 1) concept elicitation (CE) interviews with 12 individuals with AS, 2) "group concept mapping" (GCM) with 16 individuals with AS, 3) a social media review (SMR) of AS online chatrooms.