ABSTRACT
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare on March 1, 2008, made public a guideline for putting in order hospitals expected to play central roles as strongholds in fighting cancer. The guideline called on these major hospitals to tabulate critical pathways in collaboration with community medical facilities and share the tables among them. In preparation for this collaborative project, we made a questionnaire survey to sound out the practitioners in the Ama area on this. The survey found that opinions of some respondents differed widely from what the hospitals thought should be. Those which replied that they were ready to accept cancer patients accounted for 52.6% of the respondents. Some facilities, which said they were going to take care of cancer patients in any stage, were not capable of palliative care. It was also found that there were many facilities who did not like to accept patients referred to them from hospitals. From these findings, we thought more efforts should bemade to establish closer cooperation between clinics and hospitals.