Survivorship and Living Well
Helping young patients thrive beyond cancer.
Helping young patients thrive beyond cancer.
Childhood cancer survivorship is a complex, multi-layered issue. Many young cancer patients face short- and long-term effects from their treatments across all areas of life – physically, psychologically, educationally, cognitively, vocationally, socially and financially.
The Survivorship and Living Well Impact Program supports the development of new interventions that prevent or reverse long-term treatment effects of cancer treatment on young patients.
The program’s scope encompasses physical, mental, and psychosocial health interventions. It also includes support for strategies to assist young patients in their transition to adulthood and the transfer of their medical care from the hospital setting to primary care.
The patient and family perspective is particularly important for the Survivorship and Living Well Impact Program, and our Patient and Family Advisory Committee plays a critical role in advising on survivorship areas of unmet need and critical gaps in care.
To mitigate the long-term impact of cancer treatments on children’s growth, development, health and overall quality of life, the primary goal of the Survivorship and Living Well Impact Program is to develop and implement a pioneering state-wide framework.
This program will be stakeholder-led, engaging survivors, families, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers in a collaborative process to co-design solutions.
This approach will allow us to identify the scale, scope and priorities of our work, whilst not losing sight of our goal to implement a comprehensive framework aligned with our vision for every child with cancer to survive and thrive.
A key priority is to ensure that we do not duplicate efforts that are already underway. Instead, we will focus on areas in which survivors are falling through the gaps as they navigate the challenges of life after cancer.
To further our impact, the Children’s Cancer CoLab will fund multi-disciplinary research that builds an evidence base for interventions that address key gaps in survivorship care. We will prioritise projects that harness and integrate our Innovation Accelerators, including a long-term outcomes registry and survivorship data.
Children’s Cancer CoLab is guided by scientific rigour across all our Impact Programs, and our comprehensive evaluation framework sets clear objectives to measure the impact of our funding. The potential impact resulting from our Survivorship and Living Well Impact Program is:
Improved quality of care with better health and life outcomes for young cancer patients.
Our program funding is allocated through a competitive process underpinned by robust expert review. We adopt scientific rigour to evaluate each proposal’s potential for impact and alignment with identified childhood cancer research and care priorities.
