Practice Reflections: Ethical considerations for nurses working in rare cancer care: Focus on sarcoma

Abstract

Keywords: cancer, ethics, rare cancer types, oncology nursing careIs rare cancer management a nursing ethics issue? A rare cancer is commonly defined as occurring in less than six people out of every 100,000 people (Drabbe et al., 2021). Treatment for rare cancer offers numerous challenges for patients such as a likely delay in diagnosis and difficulty finding a specialist (Drabbe et al., 2021). Patients with a rare cancer struggle to access information on their diagnosis, which may cause distress (Blay et al., 2016; Srikanthan et al., 2019). There is also less clinical trial-based evidence available in treating rare cancers (Drabbe et al., 2021; Van Der Graaf et al., 2022). In addition, it is difficult for these patients to find clinical trials in which to participate (Blay et al., 2016). Thus, there are fewer drugs for rare cancer, which likely contributes to the shorter overall survival for these patients (Kondo, 2021).