Patient Information in Radiooncology

BACKGROUND: As a result of increased interest and public demand, providing patients with adequate information about radiooncology has become more and more difficult for the doctor. Insufficient patient information can not only cause anxiety for the patient, but can also lead to legal action against the physician. In order to gain a deeper insight into our clinical practice of providing patient information, we developed a special questionnaire. We describe our first experiences in using this questionnaire at our institute. PATIENTS AND METHODS: We examined the amount of information and level of satisfaction, as well as the agreement of assessment between patient and physician after the provision of standard patient information before and at the end of radiotherapy. 51 consecutive patients were interviewed with a newly designed questionnaire. The first questioning with 13 items was carried out before radiotherapy and the second with ten items was done at the end of treatment. Sum scores for information and satisfaction were defined and agreement was measured by the weighted kappa coefficient. RESULTS: Global level of information and satisfaction was good, and a significant increase in information level and a significant decline in satisfaction were seen between questionnaire 1 and 2. Agreement between patient and physician was fair, for example intent of treatment resulted in a kappa coefficient of 0.34, and poor for the doctor's role with a kappa coefficient of -0.002. Only 52% of the patients who received palliative radiotherapy rated correctly the non-curative intent of treatment, whereas 86% of the patients who received curative radiotherapy made a correct statement. Before radiotherapy, emotional state was often both negatively and positively assessed by the patients. CONCLUSION: Our short questionnaire is simple and easy to understand. It provides insights into patient information with respect to assessment of the information, satisfaction level, and agreement between doctor and patient. Therefore, it is suitable for use in the clinical routine. We found a high information and satisfaction score, but limited agreement between physician and patient. In the future, the questionnaire can be used as an aid to evaluate patient information in everyday practice and to train the communication skills of the physician. Further evaluation of the questionnaire is needed and, in particular, the aspect of patient information with palliative radiotherapy has to be improved.