• To refresh your knowledge around elevated temperature and how it can be the first sign of infection and neutropenic sepsis in patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiotherapy
• To understand the use of home-measured temperature as a factor in whether to admit a patient for assessment and treatment
• To reflect on how improvements in temperature measurement in the home environment might optimise patient care
Elevated temperature can be the first sign of infection and neutropenic sepsis in patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Most cancer patients are treated as outpatients and are educated to take their temperatures regularly during treatment. Patients who notice a fever or other concerning symptoms at home are advised to contact the hospital triage unit, who use home-measured temperature, along with other clinical information, to decide whether to admit the patient for assessment and treatment. Following concerns from triage nurses at a regional cancer centre that home-measured temperatures were not being accurately reported, the authors carried out a retrospective audit to quantify differences between reported body temperature at home and on arrival at the triage unit. They found that although temperature measurement is correctly used to identify patients needing further assessment, it is often missing when patients call the triage line and/or measured inaccurately. Improvements in temperature measurement, particularly in the home environment, would be likely to optimise patient care in this vulnerable cohort.
Cancer Nursing Practice. doi: 10.7748/cnp.2024.e1858
Peer reviewThis article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and checked for plagiarism using automated software
Correspondence Conflict of interestClair Merriman, Richard Stevens and Susannah Fleming are members of the UK Body Temperature Measurement Group, an unfunded collaboration with the aim of improving clinical body temperature measurement, and this audit was carried out under its auspices. The authors declare no other conflicts of interest
Merriman C, Voller H, Machin G et al (2024) Understanding the accuracy of body temperature measurements in patient triage during cancer treatment: a retrospective audit. Cancer Nursing Practice. doi: 10.7748/cnp.2024.e1858
AcknowledgementThe authors are grateful to members of the UK Body Temperature Measurement Group for support and advice during this work
Published online: 29 May 2024
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