Personalised Cancer Care

RM Partners is committed to enhancing the experience of people who are living with cancer, and their families and carers. There are almost 110,000 people living with and beyond cancer across West London, and personalised care will support them to have better outcomes during and after their treatment.

Personalised holistic care helps people living with cancer to take an active and empowered role in the way their care is planned and delivered, with interventions tailored around the things that matter most to them.

What is personalised care?

Personalised holistic care is based upon ‘what matters’ to people and promotes the relationship between people, healthcare professionals and the services available. It involves making the most of the expertise, capacity and potential of people, families and communities.

It is a central theme in the NHS Long Term Plan (2019) which outlines clear ambitions for all users of health services and, in particular, ambitions for supporting people living with and beyond cancer in a personalised way.

It states, where appropriate:

• every person diagnosed with cancer will have access to personalised care interventions including needs assessment, a care plan and access to health and wellbeing information and support.
• after treatment, people with cancer will move to a follow-up pathway that suits their needs and ensures they can get rapid access to clinical support where they are worried that their cancer may have recurred. This approach is known as personalised stratified follow-up (PSFU) and has already been established with certain cancer types.
• the NHS Cancer Quality of Life survey (introduced in 2020) is sent to people at 18 months after their initial cancer diagnosis. This data can help inform and guide the way we develop existing and new services.

Our current work priorities

To improve cancer care and outcomes the Personalised Care team at RM Partners is undertaking a range of activities including:

• Enhancing Personalised Care Interventions. Providing targeted programmes of training and development to support the cancer workforce to offer personalised care interventions for all our patients. Improvement work to increase the quality and number of Cancer Care Reviews in primary care settings. Providing digital support in secondary care to improve data capture and quality to enable analysis to inform future service development and improvements. This will also support the data transfer into COSD for national and local reporting.
• Personalised Stratified Follow Up (PSFU) and Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU). We provide ongoing support for the development of PSFU pathways in primary and secondary care. We are currently focusing upon the development and introduction of PIFU for people with endometrial cancer.
• Prehabilitation and Rehabilitation. We are seeking to explore people’s experience and understanding of cancer prehabilitation and rehabilitation services. Our improvement work will be guided and shaped by the lived experience of people across West London in collaboration with our service providers.
• Psychosocial Support. We are exploring opportunities for joint working and learning across psycho-oncology services, talking therapies and community services to ensure access to appropriate services for our cancer patients in West London. Previous work has included the development of spirituality and wellbeing videos.
• Senior Adult Oncology Programme (SAOP). We are continuing to support the Senior Adult Oncology Programme to deliver personalised intervention care plans for patients aged 70 years and older being considered for systemic anticancer therapy (SACT) at The Royal Marsden. The aim is to reduce complications and side effects and improve the quality of life for those patients receiving SACT.