Survivorship care models for breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer survivors: a systematic review

Background: Well-elucidated survivorship care models are pertinent in the long-term management of cancer survivors. This review aims to update existing literature and evaluate the key components of such models with a focus on breast, colorectal, and adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer survivors.

Methods: The PubMed electronic database were searched comprehensively for relevant publications in English through February 2017. Additional manual searches were conducted for reference lists and official guidelines published by oncology societies. Included studies addressed the correct cancer type, elaborated on each model's structure and provided patient-related outcome data to support its model's effectiveness if applicable.

Results: Among the 25 included studies, six articles described survivorship models applicable to all cancer types, and the remaining focused on breast cancer (n = 10), colorectal cancer (n = 3), and AYA cancer survivors (n = 6). Shared-care model was largely described for all cancer types whereas multidisciplinary model predominated for AYA cancer survivors. Upon evaluation, these models described the essential components of survivorship care fairly well except for the care coordination component. Also, the definition of time points of care was vague and noncomprehensive.

Conclusion: The reviewed survivorship model studies were comprehensive but were limited by a lack of existing rigorous evaluation efforts to assess their effectiveness. This review further provided valuable recommendations for future methodological evaluation of such models. This review has highlighted care coordination as an area for improvement and emphasized the importance of obtaining data on the effectiveness of these survivorship models to ensure satisfactory quality of life and health outcomes.