WomenCAN: Stepped-Care Pathway for Improving Wellbeing for Women with Cancer
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A key challenge in translating research into practice is overcoming the barriers – competing clinical priorities, lack of time, and a lack of reliable ways to identify patients in need. Current services for cancer survivors are fragmented and struggle to meet demand. Creative solutions are needed to enable more women to access high-quality information about appropriate and effective treatments. Evidence-based treatments exist for the management of the long-term side-effects of cancer treatment, such as psychological interventions for menopausal symptoms, sexual dysfunction, and mood disturbance. However, there is no centralized platform to access these interventions, and no system to ensure women receive the appropriate level of care. Without intervention, female cancer survivors experience worse QoL, and, as side-effects can compromise adherence to therapy, potentially higher morbidity and mortality. WomenCAN will be a central online platform to access interventions to manage the most common and troublesome consequences of cancer treatment using a stepped-care approach (i.e. a hierarchy of interventions, from least to most intensive, matched to individual need), an effective and low-cost model for delivering health interventions to large populations. This body of work aims to develop a novel online service delivery platform (WomenCAN) and to evaluate its impact on health-related quality of life (HRQoL).
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