Cancer patients have vast and diverse needs. To effectively serve patients, your program must prioritize high-impact survivorship care services, pick a sustainable care model, and monitor survivor wellbeing.

Here are resources to help you start from best practice instead of starting with experimentation.

Evaluate your baseline and prioritize investments

Struggling to decide how to build your survivorship program? Unsure where your program excels—and where you have room for improvement? To start, complete the Survivorship Services Diagnostic. Then, use these resources to guide your assessment and prioritization process.

• Compare your services against the Survivorship Program Resource Guide.
• See a sample survivorship institutional assessment for identifying resources that could be easily used to support a survivorship program. 
• Learn how to take a principled approach to focusing your survivorship ambition (see Chapter 1).
• Access St. Luke’s Mountain States Tumor Institute survivorship pathway, which helps clarify provider and staff member roles within survivorship care—and download a template to create your own.
• See how your peers have assessed patients’ survivorship care needs: 
  • Pearlman-Mayo survey of needs 
  • Advocate Lutheran General participant survey
  • Survivorship program-specific evaluation

Select a survivorship care model

Cancer programs take many different approaches to survivorship care. Learn about the range of staff involvement, accompanying services, costs, and reimbursement.

• Nurse-led survivorship program
• NP-led survivorship clinic
• Multidisciplinary survivorship clinic
• PCP-led survivorship care
• STAR certification
• Outsourced survivorship services
• Joint provider visits
• Group visits
• Survivorship clinics 

Secure staff and physician buy-in

In an ideal world, the cancer care team, primary care physicians, and other health care allies would work in harmony to effectively support all survivors. However, given the number and diversity of health care professionals potentially involved in survivorship care, cancer programs find coordination challenging. Here are resources to help.

• Review our research on engaging the care team in Chapter 2 of The Survivorship Challenge.
• Use the cancer physician interview guide to learn about physicians' survivorship perspectives.

Assess the impact of your survivorship services

Cancer program leaders should closely monitor the performance of survivorship services to evaluate impact, guide strategy, and justify investments.

• Use our table of survivorship program metric types to guide your selection of relevant financial, operational, and clinical quality measures.
• Get best practices for demonstrating program value in Chapter 5 of The Survivorship Challenge.
• Learn how to quantify the impact of survivorship care.

Create treatment summaries and care plans—efficiently

Cancer programs often spend 45 minutes to 2 hours creating an individual survivorship care plan. With a growing population of cancer survivors, you need to improve efficiency. We’ve compiled resources to help in our Commission on Cancer Accreditation Crosswalk. Just search “survivorship” and review the resources listed. 

Activate patients

In order to be sure that patients use treatment summaries and care plans appropriately, cancer programs need to provide education about the information they include and how to use them.

• Review Chapter 4 on activating patients in The Survivorship Challenge.
• Educate cancer patients about how to use survivorship care plans.