Background: Knowledge on chronic medical conditions in childhood cancer survivors CCSs is constantly growing and underlines that long-term follow-up LTFU care is often mandatory, also in adulthood.
However, many CCSs discontinue follow-up care after transition to adult care. One reason might be that the current transition practices do not meet the needs of adolescent and young adult CCSs. We therefore aim to evaluate different transition models for Swiss CCSs by assessing their cancer knowledge, cancer worries, self-management skills, and expectations for LTFU care, following transition in two different hospital-based models. Here, we report the results of the cross-sectional part.
We compared the survivors' cancer knowledge with medical record data and assessed cancer worries 6 questions , self-management skills 15 questions , and expectations 12 questions by validated scales. We used descriptive statistics, chi-squared test, and t-tests to describe the results. The top three expectations included that physicians know the survivors' cancer history, that visits start on time, and that physicians can always be called in case of questions.
The identified worries and expectations will help to improve the LTFU care of CCSs who transition to adult care, to further inform and educate survivors and healthcare professionals about and might be relevant for other countries with a similar healthcare system.
Keywords: adolescent; cancer; child; expectations; self-management skills; transition; worries; young adult. Abstract Background: Knowledge on chronic medical conditions in childhood cancer survivors CCSs is constantly growing and underlines that long-term follow-up LTFU care is often mandatory, also in adulthood.
