Unscheduled Consultation in Patients with Digestive Cancer

Background: The demand for unplanned care in cancer patients is very common and leads to the interruption and delay of planned activities. We described the incidence of unscheduled consultations in patients with digestive cancer in our hospital. Method: Descriptive, prospective and non-interventional studies were carried out. Unscheduled visits attended in the medical oncology consultation for digestive cancer in the Juan Ramón Jiménez were collected chronologically within 6 months (from May 15th to December 14th, 2017). We used the statistical program G-STAT v.2.0 for descriptive analysis of the collected variables. Results: Patients with colon or rectal cancer had the most visits (68.63%), followed by pancreatic cancer (9.15%) and gastric cancer (5.23%). Most patients had metastatic or advanced cancer (59.87%), and received palliative or symptomatic treatment (58.82%). The most common reason for consultation was clinical symptoms (47.05%), followed by information needs (18.30%). Conclusion: Patients with digestive cancer have a high demand for unscheduled consultations, which interferes with scheduled consultations and problems are not always satisfactorily addressed. Several measures were suggested in this article to reduce the number of such consultations.