Goal Satisfaction, Not Attainment, Predicted Occupational Performance Improvement During Behavioral Activation/Problem-Solving Rehabilitation After Breast Cancer.

Only the women who received the coaching were analysed, and everyone improved over the 20 weeks. Without a comparison group in this analysis, none of the predictors can be said to cause improvement, and this cannot show that the coaching programme worked. The main measure, the COPM, has no agreed amount of change that counts as real or important, so it is hard to say how much of the improvement matters to patients. Satisfaction with weekly goals and satisfaction on the COPM are closely related ideas, so it is not surprising that one predicts the other. The link between weekly satisfaction and measured performance is the more meaningful one. The analysis was post hoc, done to answer questions that came up while supervising the coaches, so the questions were chosen after seeing the data. The women were mostly White and most had college or graduate education, so the results may not fit other groups. How well someone's weekly goals line up with their long-term priorities could not be captured fully by matching activity categories, so that finding is especially uncertain.

Funded by the US National Cancer Institute: grant R01CA225792 (Dr Lyons) and career development award K08CA259632 (Dr Stevens). The authors declared no conflicts of interest. No company selling a treatment was involved.

Do not read this as evidence that hitting your weekly goals is what drives recovery after breast cancer treatment. How often the women actually met their goals did not predict improvement at all; only how satisfied they felt with how the goal turned out did. And because only the coached women were analysed, this cannot show that the coaching caused the improvement.