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Background The journey towards better patient safety starts with effective patient–physician communication. This is true for cancer patients, in whom treatments are complex and patients’ understanding might be compromised. Multiple factors can result in discordance in patient–physician agreement including patients’ and physicians’ personal factors, complexity of the disease, and the setting of care. The present work investigates the discordance between patients and their doctors in understanding the chemotherapy plan in Princess Norah Oncology Center, Jeddah. Methods This was an interview-based cross-sectional study. A total of 151 patients were interviewed along with their oncologists within 24 hours of a patient–physician encounter. The survey included both physicians’ and patients’ demographics, goal and duration of therapy, method of assessing the response, and chemotherapy side effects. SPSS was used for analysis to compare patients’ understanding with physicians’ responses. Results Patients achieved more than 50% agreement with their physicians in four major domains: type of malignancy (81%), goal of therapy (68%), follow-up (68%), and frequency of cycles (55%). However, more than 50% of patients showed disagreement with the physicians’ responses for duration of therapy (68%) and chemotherapy toxicities (78%). In addition, patients were expecting shorter treatment duration (55%), and 22% of patients were not able to recall any of the chemotherapy toxicities that were discussed in the informed consent. Statistically significant association was found between patient–physician agreement and patient’s educational level (X2 (2) =17.73, p Conclusion The majority of patients showed suboptimal understanding of aspects of their chemotherapy plan. Patient understanding tends to be ten times better with higher educational background and five times better with positive family history of cancers. We recommend a self-filled evaluation form of understanding of chemotherapy plans to be added as a part of the informed consent process to objectively assess of how much a patient understands. |
