Comfort Blanket or Clinical Need? The Role of Follow-up for Cancer Survivors

Exploring the views of patients' and their family about patient‐initiated follow‐up in head and neck cancer: A mixed methods study

“…It may also reflect participants' concerns about the reliability of the urgent appointment system. Previous research supports our findings that patients, including those on patient-initiated approaches, appear confident in seeking help for worrying symptoms, including knowing how (Chapman et al, 2009;Whitehead et al, 2019) and when (Gasson et al, 2014) to make contact, but still have concerns about urgent access to specialists and appointments (Beaver et al, 2020;Koinberg et al, 2002;Lewis et al, 2009). PIFU may increase help-seeking confidence (Beaver et al, 2020) and education, information and encouragement are important (De Zoysa et al, 2017), as well as patients feeling secure in the patient-clinician relationship and seeing clinicians as knowledgeable and trusted (Koinberg et al, 2002).…”

“…Participants likely overemphasised barriers to PIFU as regular follow‐up users—in practice if PIFU became a standard of care, patients would understand and expect a change in follow up over time from the start of their treatment, and a service using PIFU will have additional capacity due to fewer scheduled appointments. However, PIFU should perhaps be considered as one of a range of follow‐up options, in line with recommendations and patient preference (Gasson et al, 2014 ) for nuanced, flexible follow‐up tailored to individual (Brennan et al, 2019 ; INTEGRATE (UK ENT Trainee Research Network) et al, 2021 ; Wells, Cunningham, et al, 2015 ) and local (Lester & Wight, 2009 ) needs, for example, planned risk‐stratified follow up in a UK HNC clinic (De Felice et al, 2021 ). Cancer stage is also likely to be an important consideration, with PIFU more appropriate for early cancer (Kanatas et al, 2014 ).…”

“…Patient education and information on recognising signs of recurrence is important (De Zoysa et al, 2017 ; Gasson et al, 2014 ; Koinberg et al, 2002 ; Zatterstrom et al, 2014 ) and appears to be currently limited. In other cancers, barriers to self‐examination include fear of recurrence, and facilitators are knowledge and confidence (Brown et al, 2002 ; Dieng et al, 2019 ; Koinberg et al, 2002 ; Muktar et al, 2015 ), but it is not known if these apply to HNC.…”

Helping Patients to Help Themselves after Breast Cancer Treatment

“…There is evidence of effective interventions, yet there is a lack of consistent provision of these interventions due to changes in follow-up care being passed from secondary to primary health care providers [13]. Furthermore, current patient follow-up tends to adopt a biomedical model, which may not adequately address psychological and social concerns [12].…”