Table 3.

Ten recommendations of the IOM report

1	Health care providers, advocates and other stakeholders should raise awareness of the needs of cancer survivors, establish cancer survivorship as a distinct phase of cancer care, and act to ensure the delivery of appropriate survivorship care.
2	Patients completing primary cancer treatment should be provided with a comprehensive care summary and follow-up plan written by the health care provider(s) who provided cancer
3	Systematically developed evidence-based clinical practice guidelines, assessment tools, and screening instruments should be developed to manage late effects of cancer and its treatment
4	Quality of survivorship care measures should be developed through public/private partnerships and quality assurance programs implemented by health systems to monitor and improve the care that all survivors receive
5	The centers for medicare and medicaid services, national cancer institution, agency for healthcare research and quality, the department of veterans affairs, and other quality organizations should support demonstration programs to test models of coordinated, interdisciplinary survivorship care in diverse communities and across systems of care
6	Congress should support the CDC, the States and other collaborating institutions in developing comprehensive cancer control plans that include survivorship care. Community-based services and plans generated by public health agencies or public health practitioners are the key to establishing successful disease prevention activities of relevance to cancer survivors
7	The NCI, professional associations and voluntary organizations should expand and coordinate efforts to provide educational opportunities to health care providers to equip them to address the health care and quality of life issues facing cancer survivors
8	Employers, legal advocates, health care providers, sponsors of support services and government agencies should act to eliminate discrimination and minimize adverse effects of cancer on employment, while supporting cancer survivors with short-term and long-term limitations in ability to work
9	Federal and state policy makers should act to ensure that all cancer survivors have access to adequate and affordable health insurance; insurers and payors of health care should recognize survivorship care as an essential part of cancer care and design benefits, payment policies and reimbursement mechanisms to facilitate coverage for evidence-based aspects of care
10	The NCI and funding agencies as well as private health insurers should increase their support of survivorship research and expand mechanisms for its conduct. New research initiatives focused on caner patient follow-up are urgently needed to guide effective survivorship care