Priority Setting Partnership (PSP) is a collaboration between patients, carers and doctors working together to identify the Top 10 unanswered questions (evidence uncertainties) about a particular topic, usually a disease or a condition. This approach is unique in the way it takes patients’ and carers’ opinions into account to identify what patients care most about and what they need most from the research field. Patients and carers would have the opportunities to shape the research field agenda which has the potential to bring forth development and improvement in the ways doctors treat these patients.
In this project, we are planning to recruit patients with oesophageal cancer and their carers to participate in our PSP about oesophageal cancer. This will involve forming a Steering Group, composed with equal representation of patients, carers and healthcare professionals (HCPs) involved in oesophageal cancer care. The Steering Group meeting will guide the design of a survey which will be distributed to patients, carers and HCPs to identify their concerns and topics of interest. Feedback from these surveys will be analysed and cross-checked with scientific literature to identify questions that could not be answered by existing scientific evidence. Then, a prioritization survey will be distributed and results will be compiled to establish the Top 10 unanswered questions that all parties agree to be the most important. The result of this project can then be used as a reference guide for researchers and research funding bodies to focus and support research that aims to answer these questions.