Information priorities of Italian early-stage prostate cancer patients and of their health-care professionals.

The study was designed to compare the information priorities of Italian early-stage prostate cancer patients to those of their health-care professionals. Doctors (urologists and oncologists), nurses, radiation therapy technologist (RTs), and patients treated with radiotherapy in Northern Italy were surveyed. Respondents rated the importance of addressing each of 78 questions as: essential, important, or superfluous. We compared priorities between pairs of groups by correlating the percentage of each group that rated each question (a) essential and (b) superfluous. We assessed within-group agreement by identifying questions that >50% of one response. Fifty-nine doctors, 53 nurses, and 45 RTs (overall 70% response rate) and 50 patients (91% response rate) participated. All correlations between professional groups were high (all >0.74). All professional group-patient correlations were significant but much lower than those among the professionals. More importantly, there was considerable variation within each group: within each group, almost all questions were rated essential by some members but less than seven of the 78 questions were rated so by half (or more) of its members. In addition, almost all questions were also rated superfluous by some members of each profession. We concluded that the professional groups appear to agree with one another on questions essential and those superfluous to address more than they agree with a group of their patients. More importantly, there is considerable disagreement within each group. The results imply that the professionals cannot assume that their own information priorities are the same as those of their patients.