We’re pleased to announce our first publication!
The European multistakeholder PanCareFollowUp project: novel, person-centred survivorship care to improve care quality, effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and accessibility for cancer survivors and caregivers was published in the European Journal of Cancer (153: Aug 2021; 74 – 85). The paper describes how the PanCareFollowUp project was initiated to improve the health and quality of life (QoL) of childhood cancer survivors by facilitating person-centred survivorship care.
Why is this paper important?
More and more children are surviving cancer as medical treatments improve, which is great news! However, many survivors will face late effects of their cancer treatments during their lifetime, so they need different health care than their peers. The need for survivorship care is widely accepted, but is not available in many parts of the world, including Europe. This paper describes how the EU-funded PanCareFollowUp project is developing and testing two person-centred care interventions to overcome this lack of care to improve health and quality of life of survivors.
What did we do?
In this paper, we describe the project plan developed by a group of 14 partners from 10 EU countries, including survivor representatives. First, we gathered all available evidence from previous studies about survivorship care and interviewed survivors and healthcare professionals participating in our project.
From this evidence, two interventions were developed: 1) a person-centred guideline-based model of care (the Care Intervention) and 2) an eHealth lifestyle coaching intervention (the Lifestyle Intervention).
The Care Intervention will be tested as part of usual care in 800 survivors from Belgium, Czech Republic, Italy and Sweden. We will look at how survivors rate their empowerment and satisfaction following the intervention, as well as look at detection of health conditions, satisfaction of healthcare professionals, cost-effectiveness and feasibility. For the Lifestyle intervention, we will look at feasibility in the Netherlands with 60 survivors.
What is the impact?
At the end of the project, we will have data from the PanCareFollowUp Care and Lifestyle interventions supporting their continued use in the clinics involved in the project, and wider use in new clinics. We will also create materials for delivering person-centred survivorship care that we will share freely and widely through the PanCare network (www.pancare.eu) and our stakeholder partners Childhood Cancer International Europe (www.ccieurope.eu/) and SIOP Europe (www.siope.eu/). Our aim is that the PanCareFollowUp project will improve the health and quality of life of every survivor across Europe.