2021 Champion’s Prize Recipients Share Progress Updates
Children’s Cancer Cause is proud to advance survivorship care for pediatric cancer survivors through its annual Survivorship Champion’s Prize, a component of our Stewart Initiative for Childhood Cancer Survivors. The Prize is presented to a group, program, or institution making significant advances in programs and services to provide life-long health maintenance for survivors of pediatric cancers. The award recognizes the importance of the unique challenges associated with the post-treatment services for these survivors, especially as they transition to non-oncology adolescent and/or adult health care services.
Since its inception in 2020, the Prize has awarded $50,000 to eight programs across the country to enhance efforts to expand access and programs to survivors as they navigate survivorship. We are so excited to share these program updates from 2021 Prize recipients:
2021 Champion’s Prize:
The 2021 Champion’s Prize was awarded to the Cancer Survivor Program at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Since receiving the Prize in October, this program is using the funds to aid in the development of a mobile application for their SurvivorLink™ website.
SurvivorLink is a completely patient-controlled electronic Personal Health Record and a HIPAA compliant web-based communication tool. Currently it is a mobile friendly website (www.cancersurvivorlink.org) and can be accessed on a patient’s computer, tablet, or smart phone. But there currently is not a mobile application to support SurvivorLink use. The goal of their project is to conduct, record, and transcribe a total of twenty one-on-one structured interview sessions with survivors and caregivers to determine their content priorities and design preferences for a mobile application to meet survivors’ self-identified health management needs.
The Cancer Survivor Program at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center has also received a National Institutes of Health grant to explore institutional barriers to care transitions both locally and nationally. The goal is to use the results from both of these projects to develop a transition toolkit for adolescent/young adult survivors of childhood cancer using the SurvivorLink mobile application.
2021 Recognition Awards:
Program Impact: Prize funds for the Treatment After Cancer and Late Effects (TACLE) program at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center has enabled them to secure iPads for patients to complete a variety of questionnaires to gather information about vulnerable patients regarding housing and food security, along with demographic data. The iPads will also be used for support for families, including offering educational programs for children and parents.
Collaboration: The After Cancer Treatment Survivorship Program at Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) is utilizing the recognition award funds for a number of activities. They will serve as the lead site for Southern California-Pediatric Adolescent Cancer Survivorship Consortium and are planning the CHOC Education Day-Networking with community providers and subspecialists for September 2022. In addition, a survivorship resource binder has been created with a list of resources available to patients and families in both English and Spanish, which includes school resources/request (IEP/504); mental health resources; scholarship opportunities; information about the CHOC Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) team; community adult endocrinology resources; community dental resources; and fertility specialists and resources. CHOC is also in the process of developing a Mindfulness/Mental Health Mobile Intervention for AYA and childhood cancer survivors.
CHOC is engaged in a variety of collaboration efforts, including:
Offering collaboration with the CHOC AYA team, making referrals to other providers as needed;
Working with Adolescent to Adult Bridge (A2B) on adult transition planning and identifying community primary care providers.
Collaborating with the Cancer Survivor Program at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center on SurvivorLink and is the highest enrolling site in the program.
Serving as a Virtual Breast Cancer Conference speaker on “Breast Cancer screening for survivors of childhood and AYA cancers,” organized through Community Advisory stakeholders in Orange County, CA.
Scalability: Valley Children’s Hospital Childhood Cancer Survivorship Program has seen the volume of patients returning closer to pre-COVID levels since October and anticipates providing services for more than 700 patient visits this fiscal year. The Program foresees a spike in demand in 2023 and 2024 as patients transition to survivorship care 12 months after being declared cancer-free but prior to the three-year mark. Emerging from the pandemic, Valley Children’s reports there were three times as many cancer diagnoses last year in April through October, compared to those same months in 2019. This was the result of many families delaying medical treatment and checking in with issues and concerns until they felt safer making in-person visits. This creates an increased demand for oncology services provided by Valley Children’s Hospital Childhood Cancer Survivorship Program. The award funds will help meet this demand by supporting additional clinical staffing.