Personalised care across the cancer pathway
Offering personalised care to everyone diagnosed with cancer remains a very important part of the work of Cancer Alliances. This will help meet people’s changing holistic and psychosocial needs across pathways, tailored to the individual.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Cancer Alliances are making progress against the NHS Long Term Plan objectives on personalised care and reform of follow up. We estimate that around 83% of cancer multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) are now offering Personalised Care and Support Planning (PCSP) based on holistic needs assessment (HNA).
Patient-level data is now being collected on PCSP, HNA and end of treatment summaries, via Public Health England. This will enable the NHS to assess whether all patients are being offered these important interventions.
High quality PCSP and HNA are being achieved with various improvement tools and educational resources which are being promoted to staff at all levels and professions, such as the new ‘What Matter To Me’ e-learning via Macmillan Cancer Support.
Roll out of personalised stratified follow up – adapting care to the needs of individual patients after cancer treatment – by cancer multi-disciplinary teams is required for at least eight cancer types by 2023/24.
The majority of Cancer Alliances have begun this by choosing to develop Personalised Stratified Follow-Up in tumour groups such as Gynaecology, Thyroid, Haematology, Skin, Lung, and Head and Neck cancers.
From April 2021, in order to help more people to identify and talk about issues that are important to them, GP teams will offer people two ‘Cancer Care Reviews’ in the first year after a cancer diagnosis. This will be measured by the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF).
Our co-produced ‘self-assessment Health and Wellbeing Information and Support (HWBIS) checklist’ is addressing gaps in provision. The COVID19 Recovery Task and Finish Group on Psychosocial Support held its first meeting on 11 May 2021 and will deliver recommendations in the Autumn. These will focus on changes caused by the pandemic, and how the NHS and its partners can recover how people’s psychological health is supported from diagnosis onwards.
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