The Impetus for Creating the “Imperatives for Quality Cancer Care”

The impetus for creating an issue paper entitled “Imperatives for Quality Cancer Care” (Imperatives) came from a desire for the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS) to have a snapshot of the state of both the art and science of quality cancer care for people diagnosed with cancer across three domains—psychosocial impacts of the diagnosis; physiological late effects; and the state of access, and need for action and accountability for the delivery of quality cancer care.  As a policy organization, that was armed with information from thousands of focus groups and other qualitative sources, NCCS was consistently met with caution and resistance to make any changes to current delivery and payment policies and practices that would move cancer care to become much more patient-centered.   NCCS wanted to move forward with the evidence we had both from published literature and from focus group conversations for over two decades in all three domains listed above.  The issues paper provided the results of NCCS’s efforts by publishing the principles that created a type of blueprint for the work of NCCS going forward.  On the occasion of its 20th anniversary NCCS looks forward to revisiting the results of twenty years of our advocacy in these three areas.

Post by Ellen Stovall. Ellen was a co-author of the Imperatives. Read more about the Imperatives for Quality Cancer Care 20 years later.