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P04.47. Parents’ satisfaction in a department of integrative pediatric oncology: a ten year experience

Purpose

In the Gemeinschaftskrankenhaus Herdecke (GKH) children and adolescents with cancer are routinely treated with integrative medicine approaches. In addition to guideline-based conventional treatment a multimodal therapy concept is applied which includes anthroposophic pharmacotherapy (particularly mistletoe extracts) and non-pharmacologic therapies (e.g. art-therapies, external embrocations, eurythmy therapy). We analysed the recalled satisfaction of parents of children treated for cancer in the centre for integrative pediatric oncology at GKH from 1999 to 2008.

Methods

The parents were anonymously asked to report their satisfaction with treatment and outcome as well as additional items addressing aspects of integrative treatment, using the modified CSQ-8 questionnaire, a validated screening tool for detecting patient satisfaction. Descriptive statistics were gathered.

Results

Of the 98 mailed questionnaires 68 were returned (69%). Mistletoe extracts were used in 57 children (84%); they were tolerated well by 51 children (90%), while 23% of the parents reported side effects. In February 2010, 54 of the 68 responders (79%) stated a good health status, while 13 children (19%) had died of their tumour; 1 child (1.5%) was still in therapy. Treatment benefit was stated as very high by 58 of the parents (85%). Sixty-seven percent described the quality of care as excellent; 65% said that their needs were met in most areas. Seventy-two percent were very satisfied with the extent of help; 88% would come back if their child needed further help;, 85% were very satisfied with the treatment on the whole; and 82.5% stated that their child had received the kind of treatment they wanted. The mean of the overall impression on a scale of 1-10 was very high (9.3).

Conclusion

There was a high level of parent satisfaction, indicating that the integrative concept was accepted well by the responding parents.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Laengler, A., Seiler, R., Buessing, A. et al. P04.47. Parents’ satisfaction in a department of integrative pediatric oncology: a ten year experience. BMC Complement Altern Med 12 (Suppl 1), P317 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6882-12-S1-P317

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6882-12-S1-P317

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