Survivorship care plans in safety net: Bridging the barriers.

Abstract

68 Background: Survivorship care plans (SCPs) are considered an important tool in survivorship care. SCP should include treatment summaries and follow up care plans and are intended to improve survivorship care. Despite the institute of medicine (IOM) recommendation regarding SCPs, the uptake has been low in community cancer centers. The safety net hospitals face additional challenges to SCPs including patient who may have low health literacy and limited English proficiency. In addition, resources and personnel constraints can be important barriers for implementation of SCPs. Methods: Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital is a safety net hospital in the City and County of San Francisco. We created SCPs for breast cancer survivors, as it is our largest group of cancer survivors. Patients, who were within 5 years of completion of treatment with curative intent for breast cancer were candidates for receiving SCPs. We used ASCO survivorship template to create a survivorship care plan. ASCO breast cancer SCP was discussed in the focus groups and modified to match the needs of our patients. SCP committee and patient advisory board evaluated the SCP prior to a pilot of the SCPs in the clinic. We piloted the SCPs initially in English and Spanish to assess feedback from clinic providers. After requested modifications SCP was then translated in to simplified Chinese. The SCP delivery was embedded in the clinic flow and was done at time of routine clinic visit to reduce the burden of additional visits. Results: 104/175 eligible patients have already received the SCP over one year period. All providers in the clinic participated in delivery of SCPs. Conclusions: SCP in multiple languages can be implemented successfully in safety net setting in a patient population with low health literacy and limited English proficiency. Availability in multiple languages, provider buy–in and embedding SCPs in clinic flow appears to be important factors in implementation. We are evaluating the optimal process of SCP delivery with an ongoing randomized pilot study of SCPs with and without navigation with breast cancer related quality of life and self-efficacy measures. We are also evaluating the usefulness of SCPs in meeting the informational needs of primary care providers.