Introduction: Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) in cancer care are becoming increasingly popular and have demonstrated improved communication between the patient and clinician, along with improved patient satisfaction, symptom management, quality of life and survival.
Aims: To utilise PROMs in a cancer survivorship program to assess patient’s needs, identify common cancer survivorship themes, and assess the quality of service provision for cancer survivors.
Methods: Patients attending the cancer survivorship nurse led clinic as a part of the Gippsland Cancer Survivorship Program complete the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) distress thermometer and problem list at their initial clinic, along with a Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy - General (FACT-G). The results are entered into a database for further evaluation and interpretation.
Results: Data has been evaluated from 38 participants. The average age of participants was 63 years of age, with a range of 35-80 years. The majority of participants were female, with breast cancer.
T-Scores on the FACT-G indicated that our sample, matched against the Australian population mean score was; above average on the social/family well-being sub-scale and below average on the physical, emotional and functional well-being sub-scales, as well as on the overall quality of life score.
Analysis of the problems identified on the NCCN problem list similarly reflected the below average scores on the FACT-G subscales, with the majority of problems reported being in the physical and emotional domains.
Conclusion: Data has been collected using the FACT-G and NCCN distress thermometer and problem list from 38 patients participating in a regional cancer survivorship nurse led clinic. This has demonstrated that PROMS are useful tools in assessing individual and collective information to better inform cancer survivorship care.