The take-home message: doctors' views on letters and tapes after a cancer consultation

Patients' understanding of their disease and treatment varies in detail and accuracy. In order to participate in decisions about their care patients must understand, evaluate and retain complex information.

We canvassed doctors' views about the use of individualised letters and the use of audiotapes of the initial cancer consultation to improve doctor-patient communication. The study sample consists of doctors whose patients participated in a trial of the latter technique.

One hundred sixty of 194 doctors (82%) responded to a mailed questionnaire. Sixty-one percent of respondents felt that providing patients with a tape of their initial cancer consultation would be beneficial, and 71% felt that an individualised letter would be better. General practitioners were more supportive of providing tape recordings to patients than were specialists (p = 0.057), but both groups favoured letters over tapes. Specialists were more concerned about the risks of providing tapes to patients than were general practitioners (p = 0.001), but only 13% of respondents felt that the risks were prohibitive.

Wide support for providing individualised letters or tapes to patients, and copies to their doctors, indicate that the doctors surveyed believe that both doctor-patient and doctor-doctor communication could be improved by the use of these techniques.