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Cancer Care Coordination

Cancer Care Coordination

Proper care coordination is very significant for individuals who are undergoing cancer screening, treatment, the clinicians and the health care providers at large. They should ensure that high- quality care is given to the cancer patients. Coordination simply means a way of enhancing care goals and making a sound decision to the entire group involved in the patient care and at the same time aligning mutually, timing and coping up with the expected tasks among the care team.

The health care team should also address the following key areas in order to deliver right care to the patients. They should test and develop interventions to help the patients, caregivers and health care providers to manage and ensure the right channel of care delivery (Gorin et al.,2017). Identification of coordination demands is also essential in prevention of mechanisms that might hinder effective coordination over a certain period of time in the selected environment and to a specific population. Development of reliable or valid metrics is also critical in knowing the challenges facing the coordination of care.

Goals of the Initiative

The main goal of the existing initiative is to achieve or provide high-quality care to the cancer patients. And in order to achieve this high-quality care,it is important to conduct an appropriate screening, supportive care, survivorship care , conducting timely follow-up and multimodality treatment. Care delivery processes is still poor indicating that the health care team, patients and the caregivers are doing invisible work in coordinating care. Cancer patients requires a lot of attention and with the uncoordinated team,they may end up losing their lives due to low quality care.

Early detection of cancer is important bin reducing the burden of cancer. Screening practices should be improved and implemented to reduce mortalities. Poor follow up causes differences disparities and on-time quality care in mortalities associated with cancer among different groups of people.

Circumstances around Development

Despite many attempts of developing some initiatives to address the coordination in cancer care, commorbidies are becoming major challenges. They have introduced extra complexity in treatment of cancer. This has brought complications to the process of coordinating supportive and curative care (Weaver & Jacobsen,2018). Patients with other conditions require more follow-up and proper coordination among the care providers.

Sharing of information among many care providers requires more supervision for proper medication management. The best plan should be obtained in coordinating comprehensive cancer care for patients with other conditions. This is still viewed as a challenge. The oncologists are not well-equipped to managing other commorbidies and referring the patients to other specialists and primary care providers.

Sources of Funding

Funding organizations interested in cancer management includes the NCI's Health Care Delivery Research Program (HDRP). The mission of funding organizations mission is facilitating research hence improving cancer-related care delivery. It creates more understanding about interventions,care delivery strategies,care coordination burden and understanding the metrics and methods used. The NCI organization also supports research. For example, NCO Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) conducts cancer care delivery research.

Reasons for Existing Initiative is not Meeting the Purpose and Requires Improvement

The existing initiative still requires improvement because not is not meeting its intended purpose. Poor coordination remains to be a big challenge during cancer treatment , screening and survivorship. To address these issues,there is need for interventional, observational and metric developmental involving the care providers. By pursuing those three agendas, there will be effective coordination.

References

Gorin, S. S., Haggstrom, D., Han, P. K., Fairfield, K. M., Krebs, P., & Clauser, S. B. (2017). Cancer care coordination: a systematic review and meta-analysis of over 30 years of empirical studies. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 51(4), 532-546.

Weaver, S. J., & Jacobsen, P. B. (2018). Cancer care coordination: opportunities for healthcare delivery research. Translational behavioral medicine, 8(3), 503-508.