The Australian Youth Cancer Service: Developing and Monitoring the Activity of Nationally Coordinated Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Care
Date
2021
Authors
Patterson, P.
Allison, K.R.
Bibby, H.
Thompson, K.
Lewin, J.
Briggs, T.
Walker, R.
Osborn, M.
Plaster, M.
Hayward, A.
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Journal article
Citation
Cancers, 2021; 13(11):2675-1-2675-15
Statement of Responsibility
Pandora Patterson, Kimberley R. Allison, Helen Bibby, Kate Thompson, Jeremy Lewin, Taia Briggs, Rick Walker, Michael Osborn, Meg Plaster, Allan Hayward, Roslyn Henney, Shannyn George, Dominic Keuskamp, and Antoinette Anazodo
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Abstract
Adolescents and young adults (aged 15–25 years) diagnosed with cancer have unique medical and psychosocial experiences and care needs, distinct from those of paediatric and older adult patients. Since 2011, the Australian Youth Cancer Services have provided developmentally appropriate, multidisciplinary and comprehensive care to these young patients, facilitated by national service coordination and activity data collection and monitoring. This paper reports on how the Youth Cancer Services have conceptualised and delivered quality youth cancer care in four priority areas: clinical trial participation, oncofertility, psychosocial care and survivorship. National activity data collected by the Youth Cancer Services between 2016–17 and 2019–20 are used to illustrate how service monitoring processes have facilitated improvements in coordination and accountability across multiple indicators of quality youth cancer care, including clinical trial participation, access to fertility information and preservation, psychosocial screening and care and the transition from active treatment to survivorship. Accounts of both service delivery and monitoring and evaluation processes within the Australian Youth Cancer Services provide an exemplar of how coordinated initiatives may be employed to deliver, monitor and improve quality cancer care for adolescents and young adults.
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© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).