Abstract

Introduction: Breast cancer (BC) patients and family caregivers are actively involved in the care provided at the home setting through various ways including practical tasks, symptom management and care coordination. The family caregivers are increasingly asked to perform clinical care tasks that until recently would have been performed by trained healthcare professionals. Family caregivers not only deal with the challenges they face but also try to maintain their caregiver role and to keep the situation under control.

Objective: To appraise the available evidence about perception and experience of breast cancer patient and caregiver at home during chemotherapy treatment.

Design: A literature review.

Data sources: Four online databases namely PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct and Google Scholar were searched.

Review methods: Relevant studies were identified using combined approaches of electronics database search and hand searching journals.

Results: Twenty-one 21 studies met the inclusion criteria. Few topics summarized from the studies are: breast cancer patient experience with chemotherapy treatment, caregiver role and challenges, home management.

Conclusions: Patients have very different levels of motivation or desire to engage in symptom self-management. Some patients perceived a lack of advice and assistance from professionals in dealing with their symptoms. Besides, symptom burden itself was a major barrier to many patients who wanted to deal with their symptoms. On their worst days, patients felt unable to achieve active self-management and felt that giving in was the only thing they could do.