Poster Presentation 2025 Joint Meeting of the COSA ASM and IPOS Congress

GP comfort in managing multimorbidity and psychosocial concerns in cancer survivors (126258)

Carolyn Ee 1 , Kylie Vuong 2 , Joel Rhee 3 , Elysia Thornton-Benko 4 , Julien Vos 5 , Rose Fok 6 , Divya Babu 7 , Chad Han 1 , Larissa Nekhlyudov 8
  1. Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
  2. Department of General Practice and Primary Care, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  3. University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  4. Bondi Road Doctors, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  5. Amsterdam University Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  6. National University of Singapore, Singapore
  7. Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
  8. Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

Objectives

This study aims to evaluate Australian GPs’ comfort in providing survivorship care to adult cancer survivors.

 

Sample and setting

An anonymous cross-sectional online survey was distributed to GPs/GPs in training practising in Australia from July – December 2024 via professional networks and social media.

 

Procedures

The survey assessed GP overall comfort in caring for adult cancer survivors and comfort in providing care in five clinical scenarios with varying levels of risk. Comfort was assessed in the domains of psychosocial care and managing chronic co-morbid conditions. Mixed effects logistic regression was used to identify differences in comfort levels between scenarios, adjusting for practice demographics.

 

Results

217 GPs/GPs in training responded to the survey invitation and 157 completed the survey. Just under half (49% and 47%) of respondents were somewhat or extremely comfortable with providing survivorship care for psychosocial effects and comorbid conditions respectively. GPs were less comfortable with providing care for psychosocial effects and comorbid conditions in the higher risk scenarios of an adult survivor of childhood cancer and a patient with advanced lung cancer, compared to a lower risk scenario of postmenopausal breast cancer. GPs were also less comfortable with providing psychosocial care during chemotherapy for a patient with early onset colorectal cancer. GPs with less than 10 years clinical experience were more uncomfortable with providing psychosocial care compared to more experienced GPs. 

 

Conclusions and clinical implications

As an initial step, tertiary centres providing survivorship care plans for patients as standard and sharing these with a patient’s GP would be beneficial. GP-specific guidance and systems-level support should be prioritised in order to enhance provision of survivorship care in general practice, particularly in the first ten years. Additional support may be required for higher risk patients.