Annual Report 2017
Supportive Care Center
Koichi Goto, Sadatomo Zenda, Yumiko Uchiyama, Hatoe Sakamoto
Introduction
The Supportive Care Center was established as an organization to provide, in addition to conventional consultation support, positive and comprehensive support from a variety of professional occupations for actual or potential, physical, mental, and social problems that cancer patients and their families have to confront. Our main activities are the establishment of a continuous support system for patients and their families, the enhancement of a home care support system, and the promotion of community cooperation for establishing early palliative care.
Research activities
1. Consultation support/community medicine cooperation
In 2017, we received 5,198 (down 9.8% vs. 2016) new consultations. Among them, 4,307 (82.9%) were from patients who had received medical treatment in our hospital, or their families, and 891 (17.1%) were from patients who had received medical treatment at other medical institutions, or their families (Table 1).
Table 1. Details of the consultation support provided in 2016
We provided educational services for cancer patients such as oral care programs, skin and nail care programs, and physical rehabilitation programs to improve the quality of life of patients under treatment. In 2017, 157 events were held and 544 people participated.
To perform an enlarged surgical operation and endoscopic examination, the new building, which is named NEXT, was opened from in May 2017 in our hospital. Therefore, to acquire more new patients, we had many conferences held in communities in order to build face-to-face relationships between the physicians of our hospital and local physicians. In 2017, we planned seven meetings and a total of 841 medical co-workers from our neighborhood hospitals participated in those meetings.
2. Continuous nursing support
For outpatients, we provide continuous nursing support. In 2017, we provided continuous support and consultation services to approximately 2,000 patients, mainly in the areas of thoracic and gastrointestinal oncology.
In order to promote self-care by inpatients and/or their families, as well as to secure appropriate social resources, we provide medical and social support with a view to home care even in the early stage of hospitalization. We carried out a screening program which can detect patients who need social support and provided them with appropriate support.
In order to sustain seamless medical and social support, we strengthen the cooperation with home-visit nursing stations to deal with problems faced by home care patients and/or their families, mainly related to medical management. In 2017, we carried out interventions with approximately 411 phone-call consultations.
We performed a prospective observational study to establish a prevention program to improve the job turnover rate for cancer patients. We conducted a prospective randomized study using our new program to show its preventive effect for cancer patients.