Article
Information request and patient satisfaction in radiation therapy
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Published: | March 20, 2006 |
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Purpose: To evaluate the patient’s request for additional information on radiation therapy (RT) and its correlation to patient satisfaction.
Material and Methods: 247 consecutive patients undergoing RT in two university hospitals were interviewed after their second week of therapy. All patients had received information on RT during a dialogue with a physician about 4-6 weeks before the start of therapy and on the first day of treatment. The patient’s request on further information concerning RT was retrospectively evaluated with a standardized questionnaire. Patient satisfaction concerning health care was evaluated with two validated instruments (“FPZ”, Henrich et al. 2001 and “ZUF-8”, Schmidt et al. 1989).
Results: 39% of the patients would have liked more information on RT before the start of therapy. The following subjects were requested: “information on the effect of radiation” (32% of the total patient population), “how does a linear accelerator work” (30%), “what are rays” (27%), “information on possible side effects” (20%), “details on different steps in the course of radiation therapy” (19%), and “appearance of the treatment room” (19%). The following means of information were wanted: brochures (36%), lectures by physicians (30%), videos (23%), lectures on supportive measures (21%), lectures by patients (16%), and computer-aided information/internet access in the hospital (13%). Requirement for information did not correlate with care taking institution, patient age or sex, marital status, education, disease entity or diseases status. Patients who wanted further information on RT had a lower global ZUF-8-score (p=0.024) but there was no difference in the global FPZ score. Information-requiring patients more often suggested improvement in “physician empathy” (p=0.008) and “additional physician-patient contact” (p=0.020).
Conclusions: There was a substantial subset of patients through all ages and disease entities/stages that required additional information on RT before the start of therapy. This group of patient seems to be a little less satisfied with treatment and health care in general than patients who did not request information. Brochures, physician lectures or videos could be patient-accepted measures to compensate these information deficits for individual population subsets.