BRISTOL hospitals have been given £1 million to understand how to support teenagers who have been treated for cancer.
The funding has been made to the city centre hospital trust by Macmillan Cancer Support to better understand the needs of teenagers and young people who have battled the disease. With improving cancer survival rates more work is being done to see how people can move on with their lives after treatment.
Professor Mike Stevens, leading the project, said it would focus on how to give young people the best chance of getting their lives back on track so they could achieve as much as if they had not battled cancer.
"Cancer in teenagers and young people is really critical because it comes at such an important time in their lives and can have a major impact on how they get on in the future," he told the Post.
He said dealing with cancer as a teenager could affect the way young people fitted in with their peers and their educational achievements.
The £1.08 million will fund work over the next three years. It has started with young people being asked about their experiences of cancer treatment, what has made it more positive and the things that could have been better. The team will then ask the patient's family the same questions about what they perceive might have helped or was particularly useful and the medical professionals involved in their care.
Prof Stevens said: "When a 17 or 18 year old is first diagnosed with cancer it radically changes how they look at their life. They can easily become socially isolated; their body image changes and there is a major impact on social and sexual relationships and on education and career plans. The challenge becomes not just how to give young people the best chance of a cure, but how also to help them preserve or redesign their life trajectory."
He said the aim was then to use all the information gathered over the course of the project to come with ideas and guidelines to help.
The On Target project is supported by Avon, Somerset and Wiltshire Cancer Services Network at the hospitals which are the principal treatment centre for 16 to 24-year-olds with cancer in the South West.
Prof Stevens said: "The aim of On Target is to create a care system that will support them towards the achievement of a life as it would have been lived without the intrusion of cancer, or as the patient has decided to recreate it after experiencing and assessing the impact of the diagnosis and its treatment."
The project will run alongside other developments at the trust to improve the experience of younger patients, such as the development of a teenage cancer unit at Bristol Haematology and Oncology Centre.
Maggie Crowe, development manager for Macmillan Cancer Support, said: "Traditional follow up care has not met the needs of this patient group. By working together with teenagers and young adults affected by cancer we can enable them to be more in control of their own needs and follow up."
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