6
Wrap-up Session
Ms. Ellen Stovall thanked the workshop speakers and participants for a very informative meeting. On behalf of the sponsoring organization, the National Coalition of Cancer Survivors, she thanked the workshop’s partnering organizations, the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the National Cancer Institute.
Dr. Sheldon Greenfield summarized the main themes that emerged from the workshop. According to the discussions, he concluded that the Survivorship Care Plan should: (1) recognize the interests of stakeholders, including patients, primary care physicians, nurses, and insurers in its development; (2) be portable and provided in both paper and digital formats; (3) be designed in collaboration with the potential users, for example, patients, physicians, and nurses; (4) include a set of elements that represent a minimum standard, allowing individual providers the opportunity to tailor the care plan to their circumstances; (5) optimally be shared with patients, starting with the treatment plan at the time of diagnosis and continuing with a follow-up care plan at the conclusion of primary treatment, amended as needed over time; (6) be used as a communication tool to enhance the patient-physician relationship and assist in addressing survivors’ psychosocial concerns, with appropriate referrals to supportive services; and (7) be designed as a dynamic tool that will evolve as evidence from research and demonstration projects emerges.
Ms. Stovall noted the great interest expressed by cancer survivors to have survivorship care plans and improved communication with their providers. She also acknowledged the many challenges ahead that were raised
by workshop participants, for example, how to develop survivorship care planning as a standard of care, how to support the generation of empirical evidence to discover how best to implement survivorship care planning, and how to pay for this service to ensure its availability. While some of these challenges seem daunting, she was encouraged by the success of the pediatric oncology community in collaboratively developing survivorship guidelines and innovative tools to implement survivorship care planning.
She concluded that the workshop had galvanized support for survivorship care planning and was reassured that the many adult cancer survivors in need of this service will have it available to them. Ms. Stovall stated that the patient advocacy community will be taking the important themes emerging from the workshop and entering into productive collaborations with physicians, nurses, social workers, insurers, and other stakeholders to ensure progress in implementation efforts.
