Impact of survivorship care plan (SCP) document on cancer survivors’ understanding of their cancer care and follow up.

Abstract

53 Background: Follow up care for cancer survivors is often sidelined due to the lack of well-defined guidelines. A “Survivorship care plan (SCP)” document has been proposed to summarize key aspects of cancer care and the future follow up plan. Survey results of cancer survivors who had not received an SCP were compared with those who did receive an SCP. Methods: Surveys were mailed to patients who had completed cancer therapy with curative intent over two phases; phase I included patients who did not receive an SCP and phase II included patients who had received an SCP. The survey was designed to test understanding of diagnosis (stage), care team, symptoms of relapse, surveillance plan, and side effects of treatment. Microsoft Excel was used to calculate descriptive statistics on the quantitative data and frequency counts for the qualitative data. Results: During Phase I, 162 cancer survivors completed the survey and reported diagnosis of colon (2%), lung (6%) or breast (90%) cancer. During Phase II, 107 cancer survivors completed the survey and reported diagnosis of colon (2%), lung (8%), breast (44%) or other (44%) cancer. For both phases, only 2% patients could not correctly identify their cancer diagnosis. Only 12% Phase I and 18% Phase II patients were unable to identify the stage of their cancer at diagnosis. Phase I patients were better able to recall discussing their follow up plan with their provider (95%) and which tests should be performed as part of their cancer surveillance (86%) when compared to Phase II patients (90% and 78%, respectively). Phase II patients were better able to identify factors associated with their cancer where 57% accurately listed symptoms suggesting cancer recurrence and 52% correctly listed potential long-term side effects of cancer treatment. Only 20% and 17% Phase I patients correctly listed examples of each, respectively. Conclusions: Although it is intuitive that an SCP would improve patient understanding, we found a less than expected impact. Patients scored similarly or less favorable in most aspects with the distribution of the SCP, but were better able to identify signs and symptoms of disease recurrence and potential side effects of treatment.