Effect of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Based Interventions on Mental Health and Cognitive Impairment for Patients With Advanced Colorectal Cancer

Patients' medical charts in the unit will be reviewed to identify those who meet the inclusion criteria. Patients who meet the predetermined inclusion criteria will be randomly recruited in the study. After random sampling and dividing patients into two groups of study and control. Patients from the study and control groups will be interviewed individually by the researcher to apply the study tools. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy will be carried out for patients in the study group while those in the control group will be left without any intervention to undergo the usual unit routine care.

The researcher was undergoing a period of training on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) through online academic training at Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) for 8 weeks with 16 credits hours'certificate by (Harris, 2015). Before embarking on the actual study, the researcher passed through independent teaching about acceptance and commitment therapy under the direction, guidance, and supervision of the thesis supervisors. This included a discussion of the theoretical foundation of ACT as well as the accuracy and appropriateness of the exercises used and needed for each session.

The therapy consisted of six sessions, each session of acceptance and commitment therapy was developed based on general and specific objectives. An expert professor in the nursing education field revised the ACT sessions' overall objectives and the specific ones. The overall objectives of each session and the content of the sessions were translated into Arabic.