Estudio descriptivo sobre el proceso de comunicar el diagnóstico y el pronóstico en oncología

Abstract

Giving bad news is hard work. Even more when the illness you must tell your patient in¬cludes the world cancer. The aim of this work was to study in depth how the news of a ter¬minal illness was broken among oncologist doctor, patients and family. Therefore, first we wanted to know what the patient knew about his illness before the first appointment with the oncologist. Second we wanted to know what kinds of expressions are used to inform the patients about the diagnosis and the prog¬nosis. The sample was made up of 105 new patients with a cancer diagnosis. Therefore a first data page was made for the first interview. The results show us that the patients went to the appointment with a variety of knowled¬ge, some of them having specific information; others knew nothing or just a little. Regarding to the diagnosis, a lot of patients left the first appointment without hearing that they suffered from some kind of cancer. They mostly obtain the information of the possible prognosis of their illness, in this moment. The¬refore, in the first appointment the oncologist gets to know what information the patient has previously. Then he remakes and shapes the information to build a “bearable truth”, so the information gets adjusted to what the patient needs.