“The Day He Fell Ill, We Turned on a Switch…Now, Everything Is My Responsibility”: Scoping Review of Qualitative Studies Among Partners of Patients with Cancer

TL;DR

This review explores how cancer affects partners of patients, highlighting emotional and practical challenges and the need for better support.

Contribution

The study provides a synthesized understanding of partners' experiences through a scoping review of qualitative research.

Findings

Cancer reshapes relationships and roles, leading to stress and caregiving burdens for partners.

Partners often face unmet needs and support gaps despite being crucial to patient care.

Four key themes emerged: relationship transformation, distress, coping strategies, and support gaps.

Abstract

Cancer is a complex diagnosis that affects patients and their partners, who often assume the role of a primary caregiver. Partners are confronted with emotional, interpersonal, and practical challenges throughout the illness trajectory. Our review reported that cancer changes relationships due to roles being reshaped. This often leads to stress and the caregiving burden requiring various coping strategies from partners. As survivorship care centers on the patient, the partner experiences unmet needs and gaps in support.

Our objective was to conduct a scoping review and narrative synthesis of qualitative studies that examined experiences of partners of cancer patients. We searched MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Scopus for qualitative studies involving adult (≥18 years) partners (e.g., in a romantic relationship) of patients diagnosed with cancer and published in English. We extracted findings from included studies, along with key study and participant characteristics, and applied a narrative summary approach, a process that allowed us to identify synthesized themes across studies. Our search identified 15,729 records, of which 159 met the inclusion criteria. Included studies primarily collected data through interviews, with participants being predominantly female and middle-aged (55.2 ± 8.3 years). Partners were commonly in relationships with patients diagnosed with breast, genital–urinary, or gastrointestinal cancer. Our synthesis identified four conceptual themes—transformation of relationship dynamics and roles, distress and burden, coping strategies, and unmet needs and support gaps—which reflect the emotional, relational, and practical challenges partners navigate throughout the cancer trajectory. These findings highlight the need to better recognize and support the role of partners within the cancer care landscape as their wellbeing impacts care and experiences of patients with cancer.

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