Oral Epithelial Dysplasia Informational Needs Questionnaire

Oral epithelial dysplasia (OED) is a disease associated with an increased risk of oral cancer between 6% and 36% compared to disease-free individuals. In the United Kingdom, oral cancer is among the 15 most common cancers, with approximately 6,000 new cases per year and these numbers are expected to rise in the few coming years.

Research showed the importance of patient education and the provision of information in shared-decision making and management of chronic and cancer-linked disease such as perhaps OED. However, patients may not be satisfied with the information provided by healthcare professionals, despite the extensive nature of the information provided. Having unmet informational needs may associate with higher anxiety levels which in turn could affect the patient's well-being and cooperation with the treatment provided.

Avoiding these undesirable health outcomes requires the delivery of tailored and patient-centred care that provides information based on what patients truly need and prefer. One increasingly common method to do so is to obtain this information by informational needs questionnaires. These questionnaires have been developed for other medical conditions including chronic diseases and some cancers, but none of these is known to be appropriate to use for OED specifically. Hence, a specific tool to determine the informational needs and preferences of patients with OED may help to achieve these objectives effectively. The data collected by this tool may help to acknowledge the impact of the illness on physical and psychological well-being. Furthermore, this data could be used to produce a source of OED information (such as a patient information leaflet) that reflects the IN of this patient population.

In the preliminary work for this study, the Oral Epithelial Dysplasia Informational Needs Questionnaire (ODIN-Q) was developed by adopting existing valid and reliable instruments that explore the information need of patients with potentially malignant disease elsewhere in the body, using experts input. The questions were then formulated and tested for content validity by clinicians (n=12) and patients (n=5), with unclear, irrelevant, redundant, and unacceptable items omitted. The final 35-item ODIN-Q includes two scales: (1) amount of information already received (too much, enough, not enough and none) and (2) degree of importance of the information (very, yes, not very, not at all).

Thus, the objectives of this study are to (1) test the newly developed ODIN-Q in a cohort of patients with OED; (2) to investigate the correlations between patients' informational needs and both of psychological variables (e.g. anxiety and depression) and quality of life; and (3) to develop and a Patient Information Leaflet (PIL) for OED based on patients' needs and preferences.

Inclusion criteria

• Adults aged 18 or above at the time of the screening visit.
• Good command of English language both written and spoken.
• Being able to consent.
• Diagnosed with OED by histopathological examination as per the 2017 classification of head and neck tumours by the World Health Organization.
• No concurrent malignancy in the head and neck or elsewhere.

Exclusion criteria

• Individuals under 18 years old.
• Unable to speak and read English.
• Concurrent malignancy in the head and neck or elsewhere.