2022 Volume 59 Issue 1 Pages 7-11
Most childhood, adolescent, and young adult (AYA) cancer patients survive into adulthood owing to the progress in therapies. However, cancer survivors remain vulnerable to a variety of cancer-related sequelae. Follow-up of survivors is important not only to provide early detection and intervention for potentially late-onset complications but also to provide health counseling to promote a healthy lifestyle. Systematic survivorship care needs integrated systems based on cooperation among multi-occupational professions, such as physicians, nurses and other medical staffs, related to the care of children and AYA patients with cancer. Since 2017, the Japanese Society of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology (JSPHO) has been conducting workshops on long-term follow-up of childhood and AYA cancer survivors as a project commissioned by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. We have held 10 workshops over the past 3 years, which consisted of lectures about late effects (with e-learning from the third year), group work on case studies, lectures by experienced doctors on their specialties including oncofertility, and talks by some cancer survivors. More than 500 people have participated in the workshops in total. We believe that many of the participants were able to understand that the actual long-term follow-up of childhood and AYA cancer survivors is a real and important issue. These workshops continued to be held in 2020 and 2021 under the leadership of the JSPHO and the National Center for Child Health and Development (the central organization for core hospitals of childhood cancer). We hope that the training content will be disseminated by the participants to their fellow medical staff members. In the future, it is planned to continue this activity mainly in core hospitals treating childhood cancer and to promote it so that many medical staff members can have the opportunity to learn about long-term follow-up.
