Oncological patients’ knowledge of patients’ rights and oncological health care organization

*Helga Judit Feith¹,Boróka Ábrám¹, Andrea Szőke¹, Erika Tóth², István Vingender²

Summary
Introduction. Neoplastic diseases are the leading cause of death in Hungary nowadays. The number of oncological patients have been increasing for the last decades. In spite of that, the organization of oncological care is still a difficult subject.
Aim. The primary aim of our innovative study was to explore the scope of knowledge of oncological patients and their families about patients’ rights and health care organization. Additionally, our goal was to assess patient’s behaviors and attitudes towards the studied subjects.
Material and methods. 271 patients and family members from two big, outpatient oncology departments (one in Budapest, and another one in the town in the countryside) were enrolled in our study. The participants took part in verbal interview that was based on a pre-set questionnaire. The statistical analysis was conducted with SPSS Statistica 23 software.
Results. Patients with higher level of education tended to know more details concerning their disease and treatment, as well as their rights as patients. In general, the knowledge of health care organization of the participants was poor. Only 39.7% of the respondents indicated that pathologist played an important role in the diagnosis of type of cancer, whereas the same answer was chosen in 89.3% of cases in question inquiring about the role of the oncologist. These results were not influenced by the level of education of the participants. 44.2% of the participants thought that pathologists perform exclusively the postmortem examinations, while 16.8% of the participants could not indicate at all what role pathologists had in diagnosing a neoplasm.
Conclusions. Although all our respondents had active neoplastic disease or their family member was diagnosed with cancer, it has been revealed that: (1) a high percentage of them are not aware of patients’ rights, (2) they are not familiar with the oncological health care organization, which is independent of their level of education. Depending on the level of education, there is a group that does not want to learn patients’ rights at all. In our opinion, better education of patients in these fields would contribute to higher quality of oncological care, and consequently, to better quality of life and health status of oncological patients.

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