Effective Strategies For Increasing The Hope In Patients With Cancer: A Review

Introduction: Patients with cancer are faced with numerous physical and psychological problemsthat lead to lack of hope. Hope is a complex multidimensional and strong factor in recovery andeffective adaptation of patients with cancer and its complications. Enhancing the hope level in thesepatients is an important action and accompanied with satisfaction results. This study wasconducted with the aim of assessing effective strategies for increasing the hope in patients withcancer. The present study is a narrative review in which researchers conducted their computersearch in public database like Google Scholar and more specifically databases such as Web ofScience, Science Direct and PubMed with using keywords such as hope, strategies, cancer, socialsupport, counselling and selected articles from 2000 to 2016. Overall 25 articles have beensearched. Researchers reviewed the summary of all articles searched, 5 articles are excluded due tonon-relevance and ultimately, they applied 20 full articles to compile this review. Researcher’sfinding regarding effective strategies for increasing the hope in patient with cancer werecategorized in 3 sections. Counselling strategies such as spirituality therapy group sessions or thepresence of religious leaders in a hospital or clinic, holding individual and group counseling forpatients and listen to their concerns and crisis management in disappointment patients, social andfamilial strategies like social and family support, having sympathetic care givers, to encouragestrong family connections, providing economic resources of treatment and accompany patient intreatment process, psychiatrist’s therapeutic-supportive strategies such as appropriate treatmentrapport with patient, acceptance patient’s projection, educating problem focused coping skills andhelp to psychological adjustment with disease and positive reinforcement, supportivepsychotherapy with the aim of increasing optimism and acceptance of the disease in patients.Conclusion: For improvement hope strategies among hospital’s personals, considering periodiceducation for nurses of oncology ward regarding psychotherapy styles and crisis managementseems helpful. Also presence of graduated midwifery counseling who familiar with promoting hopestrategies in ovary and breast cancers wards or presence of religious leaders in hospital areproposed.