Toward advocacy in cancer care for older adults: survivors have cautious personal actions but bold advice for others.

OBJECTIVES: To examine narratives of personal coping with the cancer experience and compare them with narratives of advice offered to other cancer patients by community-dwelling elderly cancer survivors. DESIGN: Qualitative and quantitative mixed methods. SETTING: Community. PARTICIPANTS: Interviews were conducted with 100 elderly adults who had reported cancer diagnosis from among participants of a panel study of 1,107 community-dwelling elderly adults. Mean age of the sample was 78.7+/-6.8; 62% were female, and 62% were married. MEASUREMENTS: Three raters identified consistent themes through content analyses of interviews using a staged content analysis process. Themes reporting personal coping were coded separately from advice respondents would offer to others. RESULTS: Respondents reported themes of personal coping that corresponded well to previously established modes of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping. Themes for personal coping primarily reflected reframing, normalizing, and obtaining social support. Assertive healthcare consumerism and self-care were seldom reported as personal coping strategies but emerged as important coping approaches, along with positive attitude maintenance, in advice offered to others. Length of survivorship was unrelated to coping strategies. CONCLUSION: Elderly cancer survivors use passive modes of coping and rely on physicians, family, or cognitive acceptance in coping with cancer, but they offer far more proactive advice to other cancer patients. These findings underscore the importance of physician encouragement of older cancer patient initiative and proactivity in expressing views and preferences. Physicians should offer reassurance that elderly patients' questions and initiatives are welcomed.

Marshalling Social Support: A "Care-Getting" Model for Persons Living with Cancer.

This paper offers a stress theory based conceptual framework for understanding proactive options for care-getting for patients living with cancer that is also relevant to patients living with other chronic or life threatening illnesses. Barriers and facilitators to active efforts for obtaining responsive care from both informal and formal sources are discussed. This "Care-Getting" model explores benefits of proactive care-getting for diminishing physical discomfort/suffering, burden of illness and disability, and psychological distress. We highlight unique issues in care-getting that patients face at different stages of the life course. Implications of prior research related to the model for practice and intervention are discussed.