engleski

Summary of international recommendations in 23 languages for patients with cancer during the COVID- 19 pandemic

Professional guidance becomes of extreme importance for reducing the risk of contracting the virus, promoting patients' safety, treatment, and compliance, and ameliorating patients' stress. Several medical centres and national and international oncology societies are attempting to provide guidance to patients, but their extent and content vary ; some national oncology societies have not provided any recommendations at all. We have developed an international scientific panel with the aim to review available guidelines from 63 oncology societies (appendix p 2) and provide summarised comprehensive recommendations for patients with cancer. 29 of 63 oncology societies provided some form of guidance for patients, either as their own recommendation statements or as a link to guidance from other societies (we only considered links to guidelines written in the society's native language). As most patients worldwide do not speak English, the language of guidance delivery is a major barrier to the dissemination of recommendations in different countries (figure). Therefore, we have translated the summary of the comprehensive recommendations into 22 languages (Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish). The text and translations can be found at the European Cancer Patients Coalition and Hellenic Cancer Federation websites. We are working on a translation into Urdu. 48 physicians from 27 countries voluntarily participated in the working panel.

recommendations ; patients with cancer ; COVID-19 pandemic

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