Session Item

Patients with head and neck or skin (NHS) cancers face multiple physical and psychosocial challenges triggered by cosmetic or functional deficit. Many skin cancers are diagnosed in the head and neck region and hence are regarded as cosmetic and functional sensitive. The symptoms that patients with HNS cancers experience are related to cancer itself and / or their anticancer treatment. In HNS cancers among available treatment options brachytherapy (BT) has been proven to offer favourable cosmesis and functional outcomes in addition to excellent cure rates.

All professionals caring for patients with HNS cancer should assess supportive care needs. In BT ideally such assessment should be done at the initial consultation and subsequently reviewed at planning, during treatment and at follow-up. In such way the supportive care can be initiated promptly, including the involvement from specialist supportive care professionals, if required.

The talk will cover the role of supportive care in the management of patients with HNS cancers with particular emphasis on BT. It will also discuss toxicity assessment in BT for HNS cancers and the role of quality of life (QoL) and patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) in this group of patients. There is a lack of BT specific toxicity assessment scale(s) that can serve as the gold standard. Given the additional function preservation benefit with BT over surgery and in some cases over external bean radiotherapy, there is a need for such BT orientated scales.