Oncologists’ recognition of supportive care needs and symptoms of their patients in a breast cancer outpatient consultation

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the accuracy of oncologists ’ recog-nition of their patients ’ supportive care needs and symptoms in breast cancer outpatient con-sultation in Japan. Methods: The participants included a sample of randomly selected outpatients with breast cancer and two oncologists. The patients responded to validated self-administered question-naires to assess their supportive care needs and symptoms. The oncologists responded to a questionnaire in which they indicated their perception of level of the same set of needs or symptoms following consultation. The two data sets were compared statistically. Results: Complete data sets were available for 408 patients. Low negative predictive values for the psychological (30%) and information domain (30%) indicated that the patients often have psychological and information needs that the oncologists do not appropriately recognize. The sensitivity and specificity of the physicians ’ assessment for all physical symptoms except pain were,40 and.85%, respectively, indicating that the physicians could not detect, but could rule out the possibility of a patient experiencing physical symptoms. Borderline/clinical depression and anxiety were the only two symptoms that the oncologists reported more fre