Cancer patients' perception of information exchange between hospital-based doctors and their general practitioners.

Rationale, Aims And Objectives: The quality of communication between health care professionals is a key issue determining health outcomes in cancer care. This study aims to find out what importance cancer patients in Austria attach to information exchange between hospital-based doctors and their general practitioners (GPs) and how patients perceive this flow of information.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, cancer patients seeking help at a community-based organization in the voluntary sector (Viennese Cancer League) were polled with a 16-item questionnaire. Contingency tables were evaluated by means of the chi-squared and Mantel-Haenszel test.

Results: The mean age of the 252 respondents - 92.6% of those polled (272) - was 51.9 years (SD ± 13.6). 87.5% [female (f): 92.1%, male (m): 80.2%] considered the exchange of information between the hospital-based specialists and their GP 'very important' or 'important'; 12.5% (f: 8.0%, m: 19.8%) 'not so important' or 'not at all important'; 28.1% (f: 26.0%, m: 31.2%) of patients considered the flow of information as 'very good' or 'fairly good', but 50.9% (f: 58.7, m: 40.0%) as 'rather poor' or 'poor'. Some 34.8% of patients thought that their cancer disease was first suspected by a hospital-based specialist; 42.1% thought that it was first suspected by a doctor outside the hospital. Even when patients were counselled elsewhere they gave high importance to the provision of appropriate information to their GP.

Conclusions: Cancer patients in Austria attach high importance to the provision of appropriate information to their GP by hospitals and perceive this exchange of information as insufficient, a finding that could well be prevalent in other European health systems.