[Evaluation of the Degree of Patient Information to be Included in the Home-Based Palliative Care Program].

The fact of communicating to a patient his or her diagnosis when it is unfavourable, this becomes a really human issue. The bioethics and the legislation protect this right of information. The aim of this study is to evaluate the degree of information of patients when they are included in the home palliative care program. This is a quantitative, descriptive, retrospective and transversal study. The year of the study is 2012 in patients diagnosed with advanced terminal illnesses processes valued by the Team of Home Palliative Attention Support, of the North Welfare Direction of the Community of Madrid. The sample size was 184 patients. Analysing the relationship between the degree of information and the age, existing differences statistically significant (p 〈0.01)being the group in which there are more patients correctly informed the one were the age is ≤65 years old with a percentage of 95,3%. The patients with a Pfeiffer〈4 in the 89,3% of the cases (p 〈0.01) were more informed. More than half the patients had received some information about their illness and within that half there is higher proportion of people who received complete information. The more frequent were male patients with age between 76 and 85 with oncologic pathology, showing a bad functional condition but didn't present cognitive deterioration. The information received by the family was more complete that the one the own patient knew. The factors related with a better degree of information were being younger than 65 and a lack of cognitive deterioration. The predominant place of the decease in the monitoring of the patient was the their home.