There are 21,500 gynaecological cancers diagnosed in the UK each year. These are often diagnosed later than common cancers, which is predictive of low survival and high psychological distress. There are few studies published which accurately map the profile of distress and supportive care needs in gynaecological cancer patients, nor which test psychological interventions to support this group.

This study will use a non-randomised controlled trial design to explore the potential benefits of taking part in a psychological intervention designed in this group of women. The intervention is group-delivered and runs for eight weeks. It is delivered by psychologists, psychological wellbeing practitioners, and cancer nurse specialists. The investigators will use validated self-report questionnaires to assess how helpful this intervention is at reducing distress and improving quality of life in the participants. This will be done in comparison with a treatment-as-usual control group recruited from a second clinical site. This second group of participants will not receive the psychological intervention, but they will complete the same assessments, at the same time points. To ensure participants are well supported, data collection in control control group participants will be done by telephone interview rather than self-report questionnaires. Both groups of participants will undertake a three-month follow-up assessment to check the longer-term effectiveness of the psychological intervention.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Must be over the age of 16.
• Must have received a gynecological cancer diagnosis.
• Must have completed first line treatment within four months of the study start date (not restricted to any specific modality of treatment).
• Must be able to speak English.
• Must be able to provide consent.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Any patients that are unlikely to survive for the full five-month duration of the study.
• Any patient who does not have sufficient English language ability to complete data collection.
• Any patients who are notable to provide consent will not be included as this group would be unlikely to be able to complete data collection even if adjustments to the consent procedure were made.

An anonymised dataset will be prepared once our study is completed, primarily to ensure that access can be provided to journal editors and peer reviewers if requested through the publishing and dissemination process. We would consider requests to share this data with other research teams, provided that individual participants have consented to this .

In releasing such data we will include self-report psychological measures, demographics as reported to the research team by the participant, and clinical data as extracted from patient records. We will not release information on hospital site, simply reporting that participants were recruited from anonymised UK hospitals. Thus, without access to how these match NHS records, it ought not to be possible to identify individuals from this dataset. This is carefully explained to participants in the study information sheets as an assurance of commitment to participant anonymity.

We will make data available to others wishing to verify our analyses from the end of the study onward. We will impose a 24-month embargo after study end before releasing data for use for new analyses to other research teams.

To be developed by our Study Steering Group nearer to the end of study completion