Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

After a patient has completed successful cancer treatment, they continue to have regular checkup appointments to manage and monitor their health. This is also known as routine follow-up care. Currently in Canada, it is unknown how often these appointments should be scheduled for cancer patients and for how many years these patients should continue to have appointments. As a result, cancer specialistsrecommend many different schedules for follow-up care. In addition, thousands of patients attend costly routine follow-up appointments every day and there is no evidence to support that this improves their survival. There is a substantial need for improvement in the practices and policies for cancer follow-up care. This project will explore follow-up care in head and neck cancer patients, however this approach is applicable to all types of cancer. The first goal ofthis project is to find out from head and neck cancer patients how they feel about follow-up appointments and what their attitudes, needs and fears are. The second goal of this project is to look at the current patterns of follow-up care in head and neck cancer patients in Ontario and analyse how the different patterns are related to patients' health outcomes. To effectively re-design cancer follow-up practices and ensure benefits to patients, current patterns of follow-up care need to be identified and most importantly the quality of life of this population and how it changes over time must first be established.