Background: Cancer disease modifies the order and the nature of needs connected with the state of health. The aim of this study was to evaluate the informative, psychological, social and practical needs of hospitalised cancer patients by means of the Needs Evaluation Questionnaire (NEQ), an instrument designed concisely for the convenience of patients and medical staff.
Patients and methods: Different samples of consecutive hospitalised cancer patients were involved in the various phases of designing the instrument: 30 patients for items identification, 101 patients for completeness and acceptability evaluation, 423 patients for construct validity and prevalence of needs; content and reliability analysis were performed on 2 subsamples of, respectively, 60 and 88 of the patients from the last sample.
Results: The validation analysis showed rather good reliability, structure validity and internal consistency of the questionnaire. The prevalence analysis showed that the most common needs were: 'more information about my future conditions' (74%); 'more information about my diagnosis' (56%); 'more information about the exams I am undergoing' (52%); 'more explanations on treatments' (51%); 'to have a better dialogue with clinicians' (57%); 'better services from the hospital' (bathrooms, meals, cleaning) (56%).
Conclusions: The NEQ, self-completed by patients, has proven to be a useful clinical tool for obtaining a systematic and undistorted overview of the principal needs with respect to the state of health of patients. This instrument, which can also be administered by persons not belonging to the health care system such as volunteers, and inserted into the patients' hospital charts, could be used by the medical staff to identify the real needs of patients at an early stage.