GU Cancers 2019 | The importance of patient education
Hendrik Van Poppel, MD, PhD, of the University Hospitals Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, describes the importance of educating patients to aid their ability to make decisions on their own care at the 2019 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, held in San Francisco, CA.
Transcript (edited for clarity)
In the EAU, I’m responsible for education and education is not only for professionals, or for stakeholders, or for neurologists. It’s also for nurses, and we also try to educate the patients. We try to educate patient advocates that need to help us when we want to achieve certain goals in the European Parliament with the politicians, but we think that one of the tasks of the EAU is to have patient information, leaflets, or videos, or tapes and interviews because patients need to be much more involved in the decision making...
In the EAU, I’m responsible for education and education is not only for professionals, or for stakeholders, or for neurologists. It’s also for nurses, and we also try to educate the patients. We try to educate patient advocates that need to help us when we want to achieve certain goals in the European Parliament with the politicians, but we think that one of the tasks of the EAU is to have patient information, leaflets, or videos, or tapes and interviews because patients need to be much more involved in the decision making.
If a patient needs to make the choice between a partial nephrectomy and a radical nephrectomy for his case, he needs to know what you’re talking about. So, we have developed not only for kidney cancer, but for all different neurological diseases, also non-malignant diseases, patient information tools with videos that the patient can when he has time, when he’s at ease at home look at it, and really get information about his disease, the diagnostic tools we use, the biopsies, what is the meaning of a pathology grade one versus grade five.
So, this is important initiative that we took now four, five years ago and it is extremely popular. It’s translated in 13 languages and this is really, this can be given to GP’s to communicate with their patients. It’s interesting for them as well because often the patient information we give is what even a normal GP does not know very well.
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