Decision-making context of women who have undergone surgical treatment for breast cancer: a qualitative exploration of patient perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Mastectomy (MT) rates are higher in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) than in any other province in Canada, even in women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. In this article, we present qualitative data from women who made a surgical breast cancer treatment decision to better understand the decision-making environment and process. Methods: A descriptive, qualitative design was employed. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were held with women in NL who underwent surgical treatment for breast cancer, including breast-conserving surgery (BCS) or mastectomy (MT). Results: Thirty-five women participated. 74.3% had MT, whereas only 11.4% had BCS. Additionally, 14.3% had BCS initially followed by MT. The surgical treatment decision-making context was heterogeneous. Women reported varying levels of time they had to make a surgical decision, diverse perceptions of decisional choice, opinions on the adequacy of information provided to inform a decision, and different levels of available formal and informal supports. Most reported they were satisfied with their surgical decision, although the context in which these decisions were made was clearly a challenging one. Conclusions: Although most women were pleased with the surgical care they received, adequate time and thorough pre-surgical discussion were noted as necessary but not always available. Women explained the importance of thinking through their personal circumstances and values so as to make informed surgical decisions. Postsurgical care and discussion of available psychosocial supports were proposed as areas that could be improved.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".