Improving wellbeing and support for Victorians affected by cancer
Wellbeing and support is a key action area for the Victorian Cancer Plan.
To ensure that Victorians affected by cancer (and their families and carers) live well, the VICS support health services and providers to:
- Facilitate high-quality supportive care
- Facilitate high-quality survivorship care
- Analyse and address variations in timeliness and appropriateness of referrals to palliative care and advance care planning.
Supportive care
Cancer diagnoses are projected to increase by 50% over the next 15 years, but 5-year survival post-diagnosis has increased to 70% for the first time ever, meaning the number of people living with a cancer diagnosis will continue to increase. This will mean a greater need for supportive care and adjunct therapies.
The VICS support Victorian health services to ensure appropriate policies and practices are in place (and followed) to assist patients to with needs beyond their treatment. Our support includes:
- facilitating supportive care training
- helping to implement routine ‘supportive care screening’ to identify patient needs
- fostering improvements to supportive care screening and referral processes
- facilitating linkages and partnerships for improved supportive care service delivery.
Survivorship care
The VICS assist health services to ensure appropriate policies and systems are implemented that direct the recommended care for patients after their cancer treatment has been completed – including rehabilitation, detecting and preventing new or recurrent cancers, management of late effects of cancer treatment and psychosocial and community-based support.
In support of Objective 4.3 of the Victorian Cancer Plan, the VICS help health providers across the state to:
- define and measure the quality elements of survivorship care
- implement models of shared care and community-based self-management (with a focus on coordination of care across regional clusters)
- build skills in the allied health workforce to understand cancer-specific needs
- promote and embed equitable use of survivorship care plans in cancer services and primary and community care services (with a focus on underserved patient groups).
Palliative care and advance care planning
Goals of the Victorian Cancer Plan include, by 2030:
- 90% of cancer patients to receive specialist palliative care within 12 months prior to death
- 50% increase in the proportion of people with metastatic cancer who have an advance care directive.
The VICS have completed a scoping project to analyse variations in timeliness and appropriateness of referrals to palliative care and advance care planning. This has been widely shared with stakeholders and additional activities are being undertaken around the recommendations from that project.
