Personalized Survivor Care Plan for Oral Cancer Patients-Effects on Physical-Psychological Functions and Return-to-Work

Supportive Care has been proved to not only increase patients' life quality but also their survival time. An influential randomized control study published on the New England Journal of Medicine (Temel et al., 2010) found that the early palliative (supportive) care could significantly improve patients' QOL and median survival time (11.6 month vs. 8.9 months) in a 151 metastatic NSCLC patients. This study strongly supports our clinical care needs and scientific assumption that effective and continuous supportive care is needed in advanced OC patients. However, in Taiwan, there is no insurance paying for supportive care in both inpatient and particularly in OPD (only pay for treatment and physician fee). In order to meet patients' care need and concerning the reality of our medical payment system, the investigator aims to develop a systematic well‐planed and efficient survivor care plan (SCP), with taking consideration of OC patients/survivors' personal care needs across different cancer process. Survivorship Care Plan (SCP) Cancer survivor is defined as "any patient who has been diagnosed with cancer and continues through their lifespan(NIH, 2014)". One of the most important reports about survivorship care and content of care has been reported by Institute of Medicine (IOM, 2006). According to IOM, the essential component of survivorship care includes "communication and coordination of care, prevention and detection of recurrence, assessment and management of treatment/disease related distress or late effects. A well‐designed survivor care plan (SCP) has been viewed as an important communication tool to improve transitions of care for cancer patients. Increasing attentions and reports have been found about the values of SCP from Office of Cancer Survivorship, and American Society of Clinical oncology (Mayer, 2014) and strongly suggest to use SCP in clinical cancer practice to increase the care quality and long‐term cancer survivors' quality of life. There are various models of SCP, in general, the primary care physician model or nurse‐led model are generally being recognized for effective detecting patients' distress and recurrences, effective coordination and communication, and taking SCP as standard cancer care. In Taiwan, the investigator takes a large number of advanced OC patients, it is important to integrate the SCP but also need to concern about the limited time in busy OPD clinics and patients' differences because of various physical or psychological conditions and needs.