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Cancer Supportive Care Program Implementation |
- 1. Weekly Cancer Supportive Care group sessions with oncologists and psychosocial team where the fifteen programs and other pertinent topics will be presented
2. Weekly physical exercise activity classes
3. Daily nutrition consultations, education classes and lectures 4. Educational literature about: nutrition, exercise, sexuality, phacology, drugs -
5. Emotional needs, fatigue, and other pertinent support topics.
5. Classes, workshops and consultations on a variety of timely topics such as Fatigue, Lymphedema, sexuality, end of life care are planned with unique speakers and consultants.
- Advantages of the Cancer Supportive Care Program
- 1. Offer patients and families a way to cope with cancer problems with support of their medical team
2. CSCP offers complementary care, provides advice and solutions to many common problems to assure the delivery of total patient care
3. CSCP adds a fifth therapeutic dimension for patient care to surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy hormonal therapy and immunotherapy
4. CSCP offers patients, families and friends a role in cancer care by giving useful tasks, which can aid patients to maintain their mental and physical status and stay in control
5. Preventive rehabilitation's goal is to provide ways to reduce the morbidity of disease and its therapy
6. Improve a patient's health status, ability to cope, fight their illness, as well as promote hope, their will to live and to improve their quality of life.
Conclusion
The Cancer Supportive Care Program in the Complementary Medical Clinic (CMC) at the Stanford Medical School and Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco and the Resource Center or Rehabilitation program at UCSF/MZH offer comprehensive supportive care services to improve the quality of life of patients with cancer.
If successful, this pilot program for CSCP will be a model for other cancer centers as well as for Community based Hospitals and Clinics which treat cancer patients and also provide patients and their family or friends information on supportive care.
Whether a patient is under the care of a private physician or a medical team at a cancer care center, he/she should always have access to support services. The CSCP total Care program complements the medical team by providing a simple, early, and inexpensive way to integrate these services into a traditional medicine or complementary comprehensive cancer care program. The proper support services will give physicians, their patients including families and friends additional confidence in their ability to cope and to help maintain control of their independence.