Patients' cancer journeys in Kintyre--a qualitative study of the care, support and information needs of people with cancer and their carers.

Although only a short flight from Glasgow, the Kintyre area of Argyll, Scotland is 4 hours by road. Patients and their health providers face challenges when gaining access to cancer care services. As part of a Scottish government funded project, examining current services for patients with cancer, an independent qualitative study was commissioned. The method comprised selecting 30 individuals who had received cancer services within the past 3 years. Using semi-structured interviews, critical incident techniques prompts the researcher recorded patients' stories. Two main forms of information were discovered. Firstly, insight was gained into practical issues. These included how airport, health and other services operated. Secondly, the study discovered the importance of other factors in patients' lives while they were undergoing treatment. For example, patients' experiences if they had relatives living near the Glasgow treatment centres. The simple methods used in this study are generalisable in several settings particularly in communities where local factors may influence the experience of people receiving services from providers situated in a geographically distant location. Perhaps the most important feature, agreed by all parties, was that the insights gained from this study may not have been gained using more 'mainstream' quantitative methods.