[Questionnaire survey for doctors in the area of cooporation efforts when a terminal cancer is transformed to home medical care].

In order to smoothly transform a terminal cancer patient from hospital to home medical care, we surveyed based on questionnaires to examine doctor's roles of each primary and regional hospitals and its cooperation among the hospitals. We established two types of questionnaires for two groups, a primary doctor group and a regional doctor group, and distributed and collected them. A total of 123 doctors (35 primary doctors and 88 regional doctors) responded out of 185 doctors, and the collection rate was 66.5%. The survey result indicated that there were significant differences among the primary and regional doctors in evaluating patient's family members for understanding of the patients disease at the time of discharge, how to give a treatment to the patient, alleviating patient's disease conditions and a mental support given by doctor to family members from the hospital. Meanwhile, about 70% of regional doctors answered that family members had some sort of anxieties during a night and at the time of emergency to care the patient. It also revealed that about 70% of regional doctors had experienced troubles in coordinating with a primary hospital. On the other hand, 62% of primary doctors answered that they always provided necessary care to the patient at the time of emergency. In providing a safe and a high degree of QOL in home medical care settings, it is important to have specific common purposes among the two groups of doctors and patients. Furthermore, the primary and regional doctors have to be cooperative, specify duty roles when the patient is transformed to home medical care, and to have ways to accomplish mutual common goals for patients.