Departments

Medical Departments

One-Day Hospital

Mission

Chemotherapy remains a cornerstone in the treatment of cancer, either for early and advanced disease. Due to the major improvements in the field of supportive care during the last decades, chemotherapy reached a better profile of tolerance. A main improvement for cancer patients’ quality of life is certainly the ability for them to be treated in an out-patient setting; this is the role of a One-Day Hospital.

In 1972, the Institut Jules Bordet has been the first in Belgium to offer patients suffering from cancer the ability to receive ambulatory care, in a unit opened by day only. Any diagnostic or therapeutic procedure of medical oncology requiring a hospitalization of less than 12 hours may be undertaken in the One-Day Hospital. The unit has been designed like a hotel floor with 13 individual comfortable rooms each differently decorated. Beside anticancer chemotherapy and biological treatment, other treatment can be administered, including blood and platelet transfusions, diphosphonate, immunoglobulins and technical procedures such as pleural fluid or ascites punctures can be carried out. More than 12.000 procedures are performed annually. Both standard and investigational treatments can be administered.

 

Limiting the impact of the disease and its treatment on the personal, familial, social and professional life of the patient is, to date, a major challenge in the field of oncology. Treating patients in an ambulatory setting keeps patients in their usual environment and gives them often the ability to follow an occupational activity. This offers important psychological and economic benefits.

More than half of the chemotherapeutic schemes can be administered through an ambulatory processes, which represents, besides the advantages described above, a decrease in the costs for the society.

 

The practicioners dedicated to the ambulatory activity in the oncology One-Day Hospital of the Institut Jules Bordet have a high level of competence and experience in handling cytotoxic agents. The team dedicated to the One-Day Hospital consists of medical oncologists, specialized nurses, pharmacists, pharmacy assistants and secretaries. Our team carries out the preparation, the administration and the supervision of the cytotoxic medications administered both in the One-Day hospital and in the rest of the hospital. The centralized unit preparing the chemotherapeutic agents administered in the One-Day hospital have been designed in a rational way in order to offer the best efficiency and safety for the staff and the patients.

 

In order to respond to the continuous evolution in the care of cancer patients, the entire multidisciplinary team of the One-Day Hospital and particularly the specialized nurses have a major role to play: "The role of the nurse consists in taking what is strange and scaring for the patient and in making it familiar and thus less scaring." (Benner 1984).

 

This firstly consist of a moral and educational support to patients. The nurses aim to decrease patient's anxiety especially during the first treatment and to answer their questions. They are also an important link between the patients and their physicians. All the professionals involved in the One-Day Hospital have to continuously update their knowledge on the new treatments. They also have to comply with the treatment schemes as planned in the clinical trials and to ensure the close monitoring imposed by the injection of new agents and the integration of new techniques. Pharmacists and medical oncologists are always available on the floor and play a major role in the quality control of the treatments and, if necessary, in the management of the expected and unexpected secondary effects.