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Clinics Offer New Kind Of Cancer Survivor Care

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Nov 27, 2008 5:14 pm US/Mountain

Clinics Offer New Kind Of Cancer Survivor Care

Written by CBS4 special projects producer Libby Smith

Reporting
Dr. Dave Hnida
AURORA, Colo. (CBS4) ― Once a month at the University of Colorado Hospital, the TACTIC clinic takes over at the Cancer Center. TACTIC stands for Thriving AFter Cancer Treatment is Complete. The clinic is a partnership between the University of Colorado Hospital and Children's Hospital.
"Each patient is evaluated by a pediatric oncologist, a general internist, a psychologist, and a nurse practitioner," said Dr. Kerry Moss, TACTIC clinic director.

One day, four exams, and the end result is a comprehensive medical care plan that the patient can then take back to their primary care doctor.

The TACTIC clinic opened in July 2008 and so far has treated about 20 survivors of childhood cancer. The patients are among the 270,000 adults in the U.S. who survived cancer as a child.

"So there's just a need to take of these people because curing cancer is a big part of what we do, but it's also ensuring long term good health," Dr. Moss added.

Darrick Christopher is among the 20 patients who've already gone through the TACTIC clinic.

"I was 19. Just finished my freshman year in college and was home for the summer planning on going back for my sophomore year in college, and all of a sudden had a doctor telling me I had a malignant tumor in my tibia," Christopher told CBS4.

Christopher went through 18 months of chemotherapy and 8 weeks of radiation and the cancer was gone. Now 20 years later, he suffers problems with his heart because of the strong drugs he had during his cancer treatment. Until the TACTIC clinic, Christopher got his follow up care in the pediatric department.

"I'm an adult so I don't fit on the little exam tables, I can't sit in the chairs," Christopher explains.

But the pediatric doctors were the ones who understood the most about his cancer treatment, so they were the ones best suited to do the follow care.

"The docs were great and the nurses were great, but they just didn't understand adult issues and how to bridge the gap between pediatric and adult," Christopher adds.

"Before their care was inconsistent, some people did have primary care doctors who may be interested, but just not educated, so we're trying to fill those gaps as we go," Dr. Moss added.

Christopher says he feels better now that his doctors are looking at his adult issues with an eye to the treatment he had when he was a teen. And as the population of cancer survivors grows there's more of a need for this kind of care.

"We're still in a data gathering phase, we think we know pretty good what these people need, but we're learning every day more and more the unique needs and also we have to look at the disease entity and the unique treatment plan that each of these patients needs," Dr. Moss told CBS4.

That's why the University of Colorado Hospital is starting another clinic that will serve adult survivors of cancer that will open in December.

Additional Resources

For more information about the TACTIC clinic go to www.uch.edu/tactic.

(© MMIX CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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