Johns Hopkins head and neck cancer surgeon Leila Mady recaps a commentary published in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery about the effects of financial toxicity on patients with head and neck cancer. She offers strategies to the head and neck oncology community for reducing the burden of financial toxicity.Read the full paper.
My name is Leila Mati. I'm a head of neck cancer surgeon and reconstructive surgeon. Um I wanted to talk today about financial toxicity. It's a term that's emerged in the oncology literature to describe how the financial consequences of cancer care can be just as devastating and sometimes even more devastating than the physical toxicities of other cancer treatments. There's lots of research that's shown that patients with head and neck cancer have higher medical expenses than patients with other cancer types and that this problem is not just limited to patients but also their caregivers. But the term financial toxicity is really multi dimensional and it goes beyond just medical expenses. It's a term that encompasses three domains. The first is economic hardship which can be experienced through medical debt. For example, the second is the psychological distress of not just having a cancer diagnosis, but also having to deal with the financial burden of going through cancer treatments. And then the last domain involves the coping behaviors, the type of responses that patients and their caregivers have to certain treatment recommendations and not always being able to follow through with those recommendations due to the limitations of the financial costs. And so the question always becomes well, what can we do about it? There are things that you can start doing today. Uh Pretty simple things uh to consider. Uh First, you can implement a screening tool. There is lots of available screening tools and literature that is available to help guide you and select a tool that might be right for your institution. The second is to assess what resources might be available. Some of the most common resources include a financial navigator or social worker, but I'd encourage you to even consider community partners that can help tackle this problem outside of your health institution. I think a third is we can take responsibility and be really judicious about what we order and what medical tests and imaging we want and especially try to reduce the redundancy if those tests have been ordered and obtained at other institutions already. And the last strategy that can be implemented is something I do a lot in my practice and is to simply ask patients and their caregivers, what do they do for work? There are different treatment plans that can impact somebody's ability to return to work very differently. And I think this is an important part of the shared decision making process and treatment planning. I hope today that you've learned a little bit more about what financial toxicity is and some tools that you can implement today to tackle this crisis.
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
LinkedIn
Instagram
E-News
BROADCASTMED