For Cancer Survivors in the USA and UK.
Nurse support on the Oncology Support Team is an innovative way of providing cancer support. A team of specialist oncology nurses remotely assist patients to explore their concerns. Reducing concerns has the benefits of reducing some of the distress that a cancer diagnosis can bring. Cancer support is now essential and beneficial as more people are living with and beyond cancer.
Aims
- To share practice and network with experts in survivorship
- To define and clarify the aims of the survivorship programme
- To highlight key themes and suggest interventions that support patients
- Produce a strategy to track concerns and evaluate
- Follow the guidance of “The Recovery Package”
Method
A review of the current literature was conducted followed by a networking exercise with six Cancer Survivorship programmes in the UK and USA.
Results
A large number of ideas that could be incorporated into our service were considered. However the main outcome resulted in a recommended action plan for the introduction of a validated tool that tracks patient concerns into practice.
Conclusion
Evaluating our service with the proposed tool can direct enhancements based on patient need with the additional feature of qualitatively and quantitatively capturing the benefit of the abstract work we do. It was also recognised that survivorship care in the form of the Recovery Package could be easily be incorporated into our model to enhance the service.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to The Florence Nightingale Foundation for awarding a Travel Scholarship and to The Girdlers’ Company who sponsored this work.