Background

The NHS Long term plan (2019) set the ambition for everyone with a cancer diagnosis to be offered the opportunity for a meaningful and personalised support offer. The interventions recommended in the long-term plan were:

• The offer of a co-created ‘personalised care and support plan’ informed by a holistic needs assessment, to help understand individual needs and concerns that a plan would need to address
• ‘end of treatment summaries’ provided after each chapter of care/treatment, recording what has happened to date, what will happen next and health and wellbeing guidance

Personalised care is much more than isolated interventions – it is a way of working and being that should be recognisable in every contact and embedded in all we do.

 

How can you help?

WCA will be scoping practice related to personalised care interventions, via the Personalised Care Champions project. The Personalised Care Champions will be asking health care professionals to take part in a survey and a structured conversation to understand practice and training related to personalised care. This project is purposefully focusing on these targeted interventions as they are nationally recognised touchpoints within pathways where personalisation of care is explicitly the purpose of the intervention.

Our aim is to understand the detail of how these are offered currently within cancer pathways. This will provide a starting point for considering how personalised care is delivered, prioritised and supported more widely within cancer pathways in Wessex.

 

Survey Links

1. A short survey for all healthcare professionals working in cancer care in secondary care to help us understand training needs. This will take approximately 5 minutes – link here
2. A representative from each site specific team to complete a structured conversation to allow completion of a survey with their local personalised care champion. This will take approximately 45 minutes. Please contact your Personalised Care Champion to arrange a time to complete the survey. You can look at the survey prior to your conversation – link here. As a ‘thank you’ to people for taking part in this, teams will be entered into a draw for places to attend a WCA Personalised Care event in 2024

 

What are we hoping to achieve?

We want to understand how teams’ current thinking and work practice influence personalised care interventions. We are using a framework in the survey to help us understand and ask ‘why?’ This is because we want to know what factors influence ability to deliver personalised care (e.g. what helps? What are the challenges? What things may be out of your control? Hopes for the future?) This will help us know what is needed to support any changes.

If we get personalised care right and if we do it well, people with cancer benefit by getting the right support when they need it.

Read more about our Personal Care Champions