In this issue of Community Oncology, we have a focus on cancer survivorship. While oncologists are knowledgeable of the need for survivorship programs to enhance quality of care along the patient care continuum, the processes of implementation of survivorship programs outside of larger organizational systems of care delivery has been limited. For those community oncologists outside of larger care delivery systems, there is a need for tools and processes to facilitate survivorship care planning. We discuss some of those issues in this month’s issue. Jennifer Klemp has done tremendous work with survivorship care training to prepare practitioners to deliver focused survivorship care. She does this by using educational videos and tools to provide education around the needs of the cancer survivor. In addition, there is an article out of my group in Texas Oncology discussing the practical steps of implementing a survivorship care program in a community practice. We discuss key steps in implementation and highlight several free and publicly available tools to assist oncologists in the process of providing survivorship care.
*Click on the links to the left for PDFs of the full Commentary and related articles.