Pre-consultation Compassion Among Patients Referred to a Cancer Center

Patients diagnosed with cancer commonly have a high degree of anxiety during an initial oncology consultation, which may interfere with a patient's ability to retain information required to make informed treatment decisions. A previous study randomized breast cancer survivors (volunteers) to view either (a) a brief video depicting a standard initial consultation from an oncologist or (b) an identical consultation with the addition of compassionate statements from the oncologist, and found the compassionate statements reduced anxiety among the volunteers. However, it is currently unknown if watching a video containing compassionate statements from an oncologist prior to an actual initial oncology consultation will reduce anxiety among patients referred to a cancer center. The aim of this randomized control trial is to test if watching a brief video containing compassionate statements from an oncologist, compared to watching a standard introduction video, prior to an initial oncology consultation will reduce the degree of anxiety among patients referred to a cancer center. This is a prospective, randomized controlled clinical trial at an academic cancer center. The investigators will enroll adult patients scheduled for an initial oncology consultation. Subjects will be randomly assigned to receive a "standard introduction video" or "enhanced compassion video" for viewing prior to the initial oncology consultation. On arrival to the cancer center anxiety severity will be measured using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (HADS). The HADS has two 7-item subscales (HADS Anxiety and HADS Depression) and is well-validated among oncology patients. Wilcoxon rank-sum test will be used to test for a difference in the HADS subscales between the two video groups.