| Ch 14 | Page 9 / 21 | |
| Cancer follow-up |
Health professionals involved in follow-up |
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Who should perform follow-up ?
The development of medical networks and the post-graduate training of general practitioners offers the opportunity to increasingly delegate follow-up of treated patients to them. Only patients for whom a technical procedure is requested continue to be followed by specialists.
One of the most important elements of follow-up, and the reason why cancer centres continue to monitor their patients, consists in the collecting of information in order to permanently improve knowledge on survival and side effects. Patients who relapse are generally readdressed to the cancer centre.
Precise follow-up charts should be written, giving all the detailed information about the clinical examinations to be performed as well as the imaging and biological examinations to be requested and with a precise calendar. Thus, the general practitioner can fulfill his/her role as the patient’s personal physician, provided that good quality information is returned to the treatment centre.
If follow-up by the general practitioner is not possible (lack of communication), then the patient should be monitored by the treatment centre.
An important exception to this common supervision delegation is when patients participate in clinical trials. Generally speaking, the study promoters oblige investigators to monitor patients themselves and to complete specific supervision sheets for the various examinations.
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