Study protocol: the OptiScreen-Study: optimized psycho-oncological care—from screening to intervention

PURPOSE: Adequate, needs-oriented psycho-oncological care contributes to reducing psychological distress in cancer patients and their relatives and improving quality of life. Regarding the precise determination of objective and subjective needs, there are often discrepancies in practice between the screening instrument completed by patients, the clinical impression of the treatment team, and the judgment of the psycho-oncology team. METHODS: The present multicenter study “OptiScreen”, involving three German Comprehensive Cancer Centers (Hannover, Leipzig, Dresden), aims to professionalize psychosocial screening to enable targeted and needs-based allocation to psycho-oncological support. Optimization and professionalization of the screening process will be achieved by training of oncological nursing staff to improve the targeted identification of distressed patients and provide them with needs-based psycho-oncological care. The non-randomized pre-post study will include inpatients with gastrointestinal cancers from the visceral oncology centers at the three sites. First, the comparison group (CG) will be assessed of N = 300. After completion of nursing training, the intervention group (IG) with N = 600 patients will be evaluated by validated questionnaires. RESULTS: The aim is to reduce barriers on both the patient and treatment side by promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and linking the screening with a personal consultation offer provided by the nurses, which should help to increase utilization and reduce patients' fears, shame and information deficits. CONCLUSION: It is not sufficient to establish a well-validated screening procedure, it also has to be feasible and useful in clinical practice. “OptiScreen” aims to improve the psycho-oncological care situation. In parallel, the study enables the professionalization of psycho-oncological care with the involvement of important professional groups (e.g. nursing) and thus aims to develop a “best practice model”. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00432-022-04368-5.