Introduction.

Breast cancer is the most frequent neoplasm in women both in Spain and worldwide, being considered a big problem for public health. Screening is done by a mammogram. Currently, therapy includes surgical treatment which could be breast-conserving surgery or mastectomy. The second option was introduced like a formal procedure by Hasteld and Meyer in 1890. It is still done nowadays, meaning a great impact for women in all fields of their lives.

Purpose.

Establish the appropriate health care for women with breast cancer who have been undergoing or will be undergoing a mastectomy, by nurses.

Material and methods.

This systematic review followed the protocol PRISMA. The selected articles were just randomized clinical trials (RCTs). The searching was made in Medline, Cinahl and Scopus databases by the Mesh terms “mastectomy”, “nursing care” and “clinical trial” and the boolean operator “AND”. Twenty articles that included inclusion criteria were found and transferred to Mendeley Desktop software.

Outcomes.

After articles were narrowed down, nine of them were included in the systematic review. Their methodological quality was measured by the PEDro scale.

Conclusion.

Despite the high incidence of breast cancer and mastectomy, there are a few published RCTs about that. Therefore, it would be interesting to go deeper into this topic in future lines of research.

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