Background:

Non-scheduled consultation is very frequent among patients with cancer, creating alterations and delays in programmed visits. We describe the incidence of non-scheduled consultations in patients with digestive cancer in our hospital.

Methods:

Descriptive, prospective, non-interventional study. In a six-month period (May-December 2017), non-scheduled visits were chronologically recorded in the medical oncology consultation of digestive tumours of Hospital Juan Ramón Jiménez de Huelva. We performed a descriptive analysis of the variables collected through the statistical program G-STAT v.2.0.

Results:

Patients with colon or rectal cancer generated most consultations (68.63%). followed by pancreatic (9.15%) and gastric (5.23%). Most patients had metastatic or advanced stage cancer (59.87%) and were under palliative or symptomatic treatment (58.82%). The most frequent reason for consultation was clinical symptoms (47.05%). followed by information demand (18.30 %).

Conclusions:

Non-scheduled consultations in cancer patients are frequent; they cause interference in scheduled consultations and not always resolved satisfactorily. We propose several measures to reduce the number of non-scheduled consultation in oncology.

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