The Role of Primary Care Physicians in Childhood Cancer Survivorship Care: Multiperspective Interviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Primary care physicians (PCPs) are well placed to provide holistic care to survivors of childhood cancer and may relieve growing pressures on specialist-led follow-up. We evaluated PCPs' role and confidence in providing follow-up care to survivors of childhood cancer. SUBJECTS, MATERIALS, AND METHODS: In Stage 1, survivors and parents (of young survivors) from 11 Australian and New Zealand hospitals completed interviews about their PCPs' role in their follow-up. Participants nominated their PCP for an interview for Stage 2. In Stage 2, PCPs completed interviews about their confidence and preparedness in delivering childhood cancer survivorship care. RESULTS: Stage 1: One hundred twenty survivors (36% male, mean age: 25.6 years) and parents of young survivors (58% male survivors, survivors' mean age: 12.7 years) completed interviews. Few survivors (23%) and parents (10%) visited their PCP for cancer-related care and reported similar reasons for not seeking PCP-led follow-up including low confidence in PCPs (48%), low perceived PCP cancer knowledge (38%), and difficulty finding good/regular PCPs (31%). Participants indicated feeling "disconnected" from their PCP during their cancer treatment phase. Stage 2: Fifty-one PCPs (57% male, mean years practicing: 28.3) completed interviews. Fifty percent of PCPs reported feeling confident providing care to childhood cancer survivors. PCPs had high unmet information needs relating to survivors' late effects risks (94%) and preferred a highly prescriptive approach to improve their confidence delivering survivorship care. CONCLUSION: Improved communication and greater PCP involvement during treatment/early survivorship may help overcome survivors' and parents' low confidence in PCPs. PCPs are willing but require clear guidance from tertiary providers. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: Childhood cancer survivors and their parents have low confidence in primary care physicians' ability to manage their survivorship care. Encouraging engagement in primary care is important to promote holistic follow-up care, continuity of care, and long-term surveillance. Survivors'/parents' confidence in physicians may be improved by better involving primary care physicians throughout treatment and early survivorship, and by introducing the concept of eventual transition to adult and primary services. Although physicians are willing to deliver childhood cancer survivorship care, their confidence in doing so may be improved through better communication with tertiary services and more appropriate training.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".