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BMJ Quality improvement report
Implementation of depression and anxiety screening in patients undergoing radiotherapy
  1. Adam L Holtzman1,
  2. Deidre B Pereira2,
  3. Anamaria R Yeung1
  1. 1Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, Florida, USA
  2. 2Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions, Gainesville, Florida, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Anamaria R Yeung; areyna{at}ufl.edu

Abstract

Anxiety and depression are disabling, underdiagnosed issues that affect the management of oncology patients. Until recently, there has been no standard protocol for screening and treating these ailments at our cancer centre. The purpose of this institutional review board-approved study was to analyse the implementation of a screening tool in our clinical workflow with the aim of screening over 90% of patients and increasing referrals to mental health services by 50%.

  • quality improvement
  • mental health
  • safety culture

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjoq-2017-000034

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors ALH and DBP acquired, analysed and interpretation of the data and drafted the manuscript. ARY designed the project and revised the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of manuscript.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Not required.

    • Ethics approval This project was approved by our institutional review board.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.