Abstracts by key term: Value of the information
Every year more than 1.2 million people die of cancer in Europe. This means that a city the size of Munich, Prague or Brussels will succumb to cancer this year too. Due to the geriatricization of our population, we will double the number of cancer patients within the next 20 years. We can therefore assume that 30% of people in Europe will develop cancer during their lifetime. Although oncologists have been administering chemotherapy for over 50 years, the question of what the indication cancer means for patients has so far only been rudimentarily asked, even though around half of all patients will succumb to their suffering in 2009. For this reason, the Health Care Competence Center (HC3) in Zurich, in cooperation with the European Health Care Foundation Zurich (EUHCF), has addressed the issue of “information behavior of cancer patients”.