Planning for Care

Your doctors and nurses might talk to you about advance care planning. This means making decisions about how you would like to be cared for if you become too ill to communicate your wishes in the future.

The doctor or nurse will write down your wishes. You can let them know at any time if these change.

There is no set way to plan ahead. You might find it helpful to talk through what’s best with one of your healthcare team. You can also talk about it with someone you are close to. And you can include your family and friends in the discussions with your doctors and nurses if you want to.

Documents you should bring while coming to Prolife:

Please bring the following information to your first appointment :

Evidence-based personalized care plan

We know every patient is different and treatment varies not only with the stage but also with general fitness, associated with other disorders and age. Our team of consultants along with support staff will make a plan that will be fit for you. Most importantly we involve patients and their family in decision making and see to that entire process of treatment planning is transparent and well understood by the patient and all family members. It helps to build trust between the patient and our team. We encourage our patients and family members to ask as many questions possible so that there will be no doubt or hesitancy before starting treatment.

At Prolife your Consultant incharge along with other oncology team members will talk to you about advance care planning. Advance care planning includes multiple steps

1.Establishing diagnosis and Stage – Confirmation of diagnosis and establishing the stage of cancer is the first and most important step. Many of the time before visiting Prolife you must have done some investigations. At Prolife we do reconfirmation of your diagnosis as well as the stage of disease if already you have done some investigations. If not done previously we will do some diagnostic test like biopsy and staging radiologic investigations. Once diagnosis and stage are confirmed, a tailor-made, evidence-based treatment plan will be created.

2.Treatment Care Plan – Cancer is treated with multimodalities like surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, targeted therapies and immunotherapy. Which modalities to be used and in what sequence varies patient to patients, type of cancer And stage of the disease. Here our expert team scores over others as their experience, knowledge, wisdom and compassion creates custom made plan of treatment. We took into consideration the social, emotional, financial background of the patient along with disease before planning treatment. We discuss in depth all the points including treatment options, side effects of particular modality before you begin treatment.

Treatment Summary – We provide a treatment summary once you transition off of active treatment i.e at the time of discharge. It provides a list of medicines you are taking, describes any ongoing issues that need to be addressed, and describes the cancer care you received. It also gives instruction for a possible minor element which is encountered after discharge. But we encourage patients and family members not to hesitate to call on our helpline numbers even minor problems or symptoms you encounter. Our staff is available 24X7 to assist you. We also encourage our patients to go and visit their family physician and discuss any help if needed. Your family physician can call us at any time after examining you in emergency needs and we will guide them for emergency measures.

3.Follow-up Survivorship Care Plan – After completing active treatment follow up care is equally important and unfortunately, patients and their family neglect this part.

Goals of follow up are to watch for disease recurrence ( As a majority of recurrences occurs in the first two years after treatment and almost all before 5 years .). Also, there are many treatment-related sequels to which patients need to adapt. These need to be monitored. Finally, everyone has to lead a healthy life, we boost our patient's confidence, morals and promote them to lead a healthy lifestyle in future. This plan will help map out your follow-up care when you have completed treatment. Cancer survivors need to be monitored for the rest of their lives and have different health care needs than before they were diagnosed. The Follow-Up Survivorship Care Plan helps to ensure that you and all of the members of your health care team know what follow-up is needed when it is needed, and who you should see for that care.