[Survey about the comfort level according to Kolcaba on a sample of oncologic patients]

Comfort is a basic concept for nursing, studied by many authors; among them Kathy Kolcaba has elaborated a middle range theory about the phenomenon from which she has created various measurement instruments. An explorative analysis has been done to measure the comfort level of 106 patients with cancer, hospitalized in the medical units of an oncologic center of the North-East of Italy. The instrument used was the GCQ, created by Kolcaba and translated in italian. Patients had a medium age of 54 years, they were male in 47%, they were affected by cancer and mostly treated with chemotherapy. The level of comfort was averagely high (7,7 on a scale 1-10), without apparent variations for apparatus affected by cancer, sex and years of disease. There are doubts about the instrument's discrimination skills, probably due to the necessity of a less literal translation and to an adaptation to the Italian context.