Changing the Conversation around Cancer Care

by Linda Overholser, MD, MPH

Among my current activities as an academic general internist, I have the honor of working on a project in partnership with the Community Advisory Council of the High Plains Research Network (HPRN), a rural Primary Care Practice-Based research network in eastern Colorado, to educate rural primary care practices about cancer survivorship. The community members who make up the HPRN Community Advisory Council, all experts in their own right, have had a key voice in shaping our curriculum and have contributed invaluable insights.

At one of our recent meetings, while we spent the afternoon sharing stories, exchanging knowledge and discussing topics that we should prioritize for the next part of the project, I was struck by how comforting it was to sit in that space and just listen to the conversation that was taking place. It was a group of individuals who really cared about making cancer survivorship care work better for their communities. Their commitment was clear and started with conversations like this.

Primary care providers are accustomed to discussing ways to prevent cancer, how to screen for it and tests used to diagnose it. We present facts and evidence. Occasionally, we have conversations with our patients about what can be done to provide comfort when aggressive cancer treatment is not considered to be beneficial or no longer works. But as we make progress in the war on cancer and as the number of cancer survivors continues to grow, we now need to be able to have conversations with our patients and with our colleagues that will help support cancer survivors not only at diagnosis, but throughout their cancer journey.

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