Comprehensive assessment of cancer survivors' concerns to inform program development

Abstract

Complex cancer treatments, limited personnel resources, and a growing number of cancer survivors are challenging cancer health care professionals’ abilities to provide comprehensive care. Cancer survivors have a range of needs that extend over the cancer care trajectory and that represent physical, psychological, social, and spiritual domains. Numerous studies have explored supportive care needs and recent systematic reviews have highlighted the supportive care needs related to cancer1 and to specific cancer types, including prostate cancer,2 breast cancer,3 gynecologic cancer,4 hematological cancer,5 and lung cancer.6 However, reviews are limited in that they do not always assess needs across the cancer trajectory or identify demographic or clinical variables that are associated with needs. These data are needed to focus survivorship program development in cancer centers in order to target populations most likely at risk for unmet needs, identify what salient concerns to address, and to appropriately schedule supportive care programs. The importance of assessing the patient’s subjective view of his/her needs or concerns is well acknowledged as being fundamental to patientcentered care.7 Clinicians routinely assess needs in practice using a variety of screening tools. However, there needs to be a broader assessment of concerns and needs in a population of survivors with mixed cancer diagnoses, along with their appraisal of how well their needs were addressed by their health care team, to provide an overall identification of gaps in supportive care. The primary purpose of the present study was to prioritize survivors’ most salient physical, social, emotional, and spiritual concerns or needs; ascertain survivors’ perceived importance of those needs and the extent to which our institution, the University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center, was attentive to those needs; and to identify who