Research Article
Does the Primary Care Experience Influence the Cancer Diagnostic Process?
Table 8
Proportion (%) of attributed and missing data in dates used to calculate elapsed times (Appendix A).
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Patients who were unable to provide specific dates were asked to indicate the month and year of the event and to specify whether the event occurred at the beginning, middle, or end of the month; the date corresponding to the mid-point of that period was then attributed to the event. Residual missing data for date of diagnosis were estimated from the dates of diagnosis entered in the oncology clinics’ cancer registries. However, since self-reported dates of diagnosis usually differed from registries’ dates of diagnosis, we replaced missing data in questionnaire by the data of the registries, adjusted by the mean difference between the dates of diagnosis entered in the registries and the dates indicated by responding patients, by cancer site. 1This proportion includes 26% from partial data provided by patients and 8% from the cancer registries. 2This proportion includes 17% from partial data provided by patients and 3% from the cancer registries. 3This proportion includes 23% from partial data provided by patients and 10% from the cancer registries. 4This proportion includes 36% from partial data provided by patients and 12% from the cancer registries. |