Yates 2005.

Study characteristics
Methods	Setting: Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia Recruitment: eligible patients were aged 18 years or older, had stage I or II breast cancer, were commencing adjuvant chemotherapy, and had an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance rating of 1or 2; their haemoglobin level was at least 11.6 g/mL. Participants were recruited from 5 outpatient clinics at 3 major metropolitan hospitals Randomisation: RCT
Participants	109 women aged 18 years or older with breast cancer
Interventions	Intervention: psycho‐educational intervention aiming to improve participants' knowledge and skills to enable them to perform self‐care behaviours designed to minimise fatigue. Consisted of 3 sessions tailored to participants' individual needs and circumstances. The first session consisted of a 20‐minute face‐to‐face meeting in the clinic at the participant's second chemotherapy course, and focused on techniques of information‐giving, problem‐solving, rehearsal, and reinforcement. The second and third sessions were delivered by telephone, were conducted a week apart, and lasted 10 minutes each. In these sessions, participants' fatigue management strategies were reviewed. Printed information supplemented the face‐to‐face/telephone interactions Control group: participants received general cancer education in the form of verbal and printed information about cancer in sessions equivalent in number and timing to the sessions provided to the intervention group Interventionist: oncology nurses trained in the research programme and in the fatigue management or control intervention
Outcomes	Psychological symptoms ‐ anxiety, depression, self‐efficacy with coping with cancer Fatigue ‐ use of fatigue‐management behaviours, confidence with managing fatigue, fatigue intensity, and impact Impact on quality of life/functioning ‐ quality of life Methods for assessing outcomes: Investigator‐designed questionnaire based on elements from the Revised Piper Fatigue Scale (RPFS) Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy ‐ Fatigue (FACT‐F) 30‐item European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer Quality of Life Questionnaire C30 (version 3)
Notes
Risk of bias
Bias	Authors' judgement	Support for judgement
Random sequence generation (selection bias)	Low risk	Participants were randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions through a central telephone system via computer‐generated random numbers
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	Low risk	Group allocation was concealed from research assistants involved in recruitment and in baseline and follow‐up assessments
Blinding (performance bias and detection bias) All outcomes	Unclear risk	Not stated
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Low risk	Loss to follow‐up < 20%; similar reasons between groups
Selective reporting (reporting bias)	Low risk	There appears to be no selective reporting
Other bias	Low risk	The trial appears to be free of other problems that could put it at high risk of bias

CBT: cognitive‐behavioural therapy.

ECOG: Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group.

GP: general practitioner.

RCT: randomised controlled trial.

SIGN: Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network.

TAU: treatment as usual.