Understanding lung cancer patients’ experiences
Insights from the Global Lung Cancer Coalition’s 2024 global patient experience survey
October 2024
Introduction
For the last five years, the Global Lung Cancer Coalition (GLCC) has run an annual global patient experience survey, gathering a wealth of useful data and insights on experiences of diagnosis, treatment, and care. We at the GLCC want to understand patients’ experiences of lung cancer and the barriers and challenges they face to inform our global and national campaigning priorities, and we conduct this survey yearly to ensure our ongoing activities and advocacy are reflective of current patient experiences, needs, and preferences.
This report sets out the global findings from our fourth annual global survey, which ran from 28 March 2024 to 14 May 2024 and received 905 responses from patients across 18 countries.
We are grateful to all the patients who took the time to share their experiences via the survey. We hope the findings will be useful to policymakers in their planning, as well as to campaigners advocating for lung cancer patients’ needs.
Key findings & common themes
As stated in our patient charter, the GLCC believes that every patient has the right to have access to quality health care; informed self-determination; physical and mental integrity; and confidentiality and privacy, and to be treated with dignity and respect.
While each patient’s experience and preferences during their lung cancer journey are different, there are some common themes across varying geographies and health systems.
This year’s patient experience survey highlighted some encouraging trends including improved involvement score in treatment and care decisions (when compared to the 2023 results) and good support for patients who either chose not to pursue or have no treatment options available.
However, it was also clear from the survey results that more needs to be done to ensure patients get the information they need at the time that it is most useful to them. This is true across the patient journey, including for biomarker testing – where there is still significant confusion amongst patients despite relatively high levels of access to testing.
Our Global Report into the findings from our 2024 survey can viewed and downloaded as a pdf or Word document here:
Excel spreadsheet outlining questions asked and patients’ responses
The following national infographics can be downloaded in pdf format:
