Current childhood cancer survivor long-term follow-up practices in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The number of childhood cancer survivors (CCSs) is increasing due to improved survival. Most suffer at least one treatment-related late effect, even decades after treatment, thus lifelong long-term follow-up (LTFU) care is a necessity. Currently no standardized LTFU programme for CCSs exists in South Africa. Study purpose: This study investigated current LTFU care of CCSs in South Africa. Methods: A survey was conducted amongst 31 South African paediatric oncologists using the SurveyMonkeyTM online tool. Information obtained included: training/experience, LTFU practices, late effects knowledge and opinion regarding the importance of a standardized LTFU programme. Results: The response rate was 74% (23/31). Respondents had an average of 9 years’ experience. All (22/23; 96%) regarded LTFU as important. Only half (12/23; 52%) discussed late effects at diagnosis. Infertility and second malignancy risks were discussed by a third. Less than half (48%) used LTFU guidelines; the majority (9/11; 82%) adjusted them to the local context. Most survivors were followed by a paediatric oncologist (17/23; 74%). About half of respondents (47.8%) shared LTFU with colleagues in private practice (50%), secondary (66.7%) or primary care facilities (25%). Almost half of respondents (10/23; 43.5%) regarded their late effects knowledge and LTFU experience as good, 8/23 (34.8%) as adequate and 3/23 (13%) as inadequate. All agreed that a national LTFU programme would be very important (87%) or important (13%). Almost half of the respondents (48%) understood what a Survivorship Passport was. Conclusion: It is essential to develop a national standardized LTFU programme for CCSs in South Africa to ensure appropriate care for all survivors.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".