What is Survivorship Champions?

• NCCS’ program to engage and support clinicians and researchers who are interested in improving care for cancer survivors.
• A community, with a multi-directional information exchange about best practices, lessons learned, and effective models of survivorship care.

The Need

As treatments for cancer improve, more people are living with a history of cancer, and the long-term effects of cancer treatment. With more than 17 million cancer survivors in the U.S., the current oncology workforce is not sufficient to handle the acute needs of cancer patients who are in treatment, or who have completed treatment. Thus, it is imperative that some of the responsibility for providing survivorship care shifts from oncologists to primary care physicians.  Even survivors who require continued follow-up by their oncology team need primary care physicians who understand their cancer experience and their health needs in post-treatment survivorship.

The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies issued a report in 2005, “From Cancer Patient to Cancer Survivor: Lost in Transition,” that included several recommendations for improving the quality of care for survivors as they transition from active treatment to long-term survivorship. In response, NCCS and other patient and provider organizations worked to implement key recommendations of the report. Despite these efforts, cancer survivors in 2021 too often describe their movement from active treatment as a time of being “lost in transition,” exactly the experience and emotion captured by the Institute of Medicine in 2005.