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

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.

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.

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.

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.