Cancer and chemotherapy can be physically and emotionally challenging for patients and their families (American Cancer Society 2011), a situation that can be worsened by uncertainty about appointment times when patients are placed on a waiting list. Patients frequently need to coordinate transportation, the intake of pre-treatment drugs and travel plans when living in more distant locations. Ambiguity in appointment times is certainly problematic and negatively affects the patient experience. This uncertainty in dates and times of chemotherapy results in a lack of control and a loss of normalcy to life that compounds the quality-of-life impairment associated with the chemotherapy itself (Redeker et al. 2000).

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