Totally implantable venous access ports--the patients' point of view. A quality control study.

After implanting > 150 totally implantable venous catheters, 40 patients were interviewed about their experiences by telephone using a standard questionnaire. There were 25 women and 15 men, all having or having had chemotherapy for nonresectable advanced cancer, 26 of them by means of a portable pump. Almost all patients thought that the advantages of the Port-a-Cath (PAC) outweighed its disadvantages; they were not hindered in their daily activities, and none of the patients experienced problems with sexual intercourse because of the PAC. Drawbacks of the method are that 40% of the patients found the operation for insertion of the PAC to be more painful than they had expected. Although PAC reduced the fear of repeated peripheral vein puncture, puncture of the PAC was viewed as painful by 15 of the 40 patients. We conclude that a PAC seems to be preferable to an external catheter but that pre- and postoperative patient information needs to be improved.