[Barriers upon providing assistance with making arrangements for discharging and changing from hospitals while a...

There has been an increase in cancer patient referrals to our palliative care team during a cancer treatment. In order to help an end-of-life stage homecare cancer patient who becomes being depressed and the family being felt restlessness, a fine-tuned response, an early stage of revelation of the disease and treatment are essential to have a long lasting homecare environment. Based on the Basic Plan to Promote Cancer Control Programs, our hospital established a cancer consulting support center and a palliative cancer care team in June 2009, and staffed them with multidisciplinary personnel. With medical staffs involved as a team, we considered a shared decision making repeatedly in compliance with in-patient's wishes for home care. One of the problems we have experienced was that a patient would take a long time for a decision making due to the state of mental depression, even if the patient had an ability to think and evaluate oneself. For a medicinal treatment of cancer patient with the state of depression, steroid, interferon, hypertension drug, female hormone pill, anti-histamine medicine and anti-fungus agent will cause frequent side effects, but they are easy to get rid of the symptoms. It appears that 5-percent of the patients who had steroid administered 10 days ago have a tendency to have a high manifested risk in 40mg/day PURRE- DONIZORO/Japan calculated. In case of medication related depression, the symptom can be rather controlled quickly by a decrease in the amount of medication. On the other hand, there is a possibility that side effects may appear before anti-depression comes to effects in case of an ordinary depression case. And it takes 2-4 weeks for the medicine to be effective. Therefore, amid the cancer patient is being in the state of depression, a decision to transfer the patient for home care environment should be delayed. This is why we ought to investigate it as one of the problems in palliative care. In conclusion, due to a patient's inability to make own decision, or for a home care period to be not shortened, or we fail to make a right timing to for sending the patient to home, a careful daily observation and a fine-tuned response are desired for a sign of depression with the cancer patient.