Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing interviews with members of the PanCareFollowUp consortium. First up is the project coordinator, Prof. Leontien Kremer from the Princess Maximá Center in the Netherlands.
Please introduce yourself and share with us why you joined PanCareFollowUp.
My name is Leontien Kremer and I am the Coordinator of PanCareFollowUp. My main focus is on childhood cancer survivorship research and evidence-based pediatric oncology care. Within the PanCareFollowUp project I am responsible for both the development and assessment of the PanCareFollowUp Care and Lifestyle interventions.
Explain PanCareFollowUp shortly.
PanCareFollowUp aims to improve health and quality of life of survivors of childhood and adolescent cancer, by ensuring optimal survivorship care across Europe. To meet this goal, three main objectives were established:
1. Development and testing of the PanCareFollowUp Care Intervention.
2. Development and testing of the PanCareFollowUp eHealth Lifestyle Intervention.
3. Replication and wide dissemination of materials and results.
Why do you think PanCareFollowUp is an important project?
The PanCareFollowUp project is of great importance as availability of survivorship care varies considerably across countries. Multiple challenges exist that prevent survivorship care to be implemented properly, and in order to overcome these challenges, we need to understand them better. With the PanCareFollowUp project we hope to contribute to the realization of optimal survivorship care for all survivors of childhood or adolescent cancer in Europe.
What makes this project unique for you?
The diversity of the PanCareFollowUp consortium! The group consists of people from many different countries and everyone has their own expertise.
And the relevance for survivors of childhood cancer:
• We will develop tools that can be used in survivorship care.
• We give insight in barriers and facilitators of survivorship care.
• We make European wide guidelines.
• We will implement these guidelines.
• We will get insight in the costs of clinic visits and many other outcomes.
• Most importantly, we will get to know if a visit to a survivorship clinic is of any benefit for survivors.
What do you hope this project will achieve?
I hope that this project will bring us closer to our final goal – to realize optimal survivorship care for all survivors of childhood or adolescent cancer and to improve their quality of life.
What’s the biggest challenge in this project?
The complexity and the scale of the project with many people working in it which have all different tasks it is hard to keep the overview and monitor timelines!
What’s the most fun thing in this project?
To work with all the PanCareFollowUp colleagues and to see the intrinsic motivation of all who are involved. This collaboration with reserachers, care providers and survivors is very inspiring.
Furthermore, we have created a project that is of huge benefit for survivors. The relevance is huge!
What’s the most important benefit of this project for survivors?
With this project, we can determine whether visits to a survivorship clinic are of any benefit to survivors, and how we can overcome the barriers that currently prevent proper implementation of survivorship care at a European level.