Hope in advanced cancer patients

Individuals diagnosed with advanced cancer frequently experience physical and psychological distress. Hope has been identified as an essential resource in the lives of people with cancer, helping them to cope during times of suffering and uncertainty. Therefore, in order to help bolster hope, health care providers require an understanding of its meaning from the perspective of advanced cancer patients and an awareness of those interventions demonstrated empirically to foster hope in this patient population. This paper summarises salient evidence pertaining to hope in advanced cancer patients and their families or informal caregivers. We examine the challenging issue of how to define hope, discuss the issue of measuring hope and review the state of evidence addressing interventions that may enhance or bolster hope in the face of advanced disease.