The 1700 Texas women diagnosed with ovarian cancer this year face daunting treatments and worrisome statistics about their likelihood of survival. Ovarian cancer remains the deadliest of the gynecological cancers and 4 out of 5 women enter treatment with advanced disease. There is little evidence to guide survivorship care for ovarian cancer patients. Our research asks whether a survivorship care transition process designed to focus on helping people live well with serious disease can improve quality of life for ovarian cancer survivors.

Our team developed a survivorship care process called POSTCare that helps breast cancer survivors experience better quality of life. We worked with ova...

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The 1700 Texas women diagnosed with ovarian cancer this year face daunting treatments and worrisome statistics about their likelihood of survival. Ovarian cancer remains the deadliest of the gynecological cancers and 4 out of 5 women enter treatment with advanced disease. There is little evidence to guide survivorship care for ovarian cancer patients. Our research asks whether a survivorship care transition process designed to focus on helping people live well with serious disease can improve quality of life for ovarian cancer survivors.

Our team developed a survivorship care process called POSTCare that helps breast cancer survivors experience better quality of life. We worked with ovarian cancer patients to adapt the process to address their unique needs. They were clear that they want to focus on living well despite their diagnosis. For people with cancer palliative care is known to improve quality of life, reduce symptoms, and help people live longer. We will examine whether incorporating elements of palliative care that focus on living well into survivorship care improves outcomes.

In this study, we will recruit 120 women with ovarian cancer to receive POSTCare-O Survivorship Care. We will measure quality of life, symptom burden, and recurrence anxiety along with factors that influence these outcomes. We will interview participants at the completion of the study to better understand how the intervention is beneficial, and how we might adapt it to be more impactful and culturally acceptable. This grant will allow us to refine the intervention to better meet the needs of women with ovarian cancer, generate hypotheses about how the intervention is effective, and inform the development of a trial that will test the POSTCare-O Survivorship Care Transition against usual care across several health systems. This work has the potential to change how we care for women with ovarian cancer, and other patients who are living with cancer after treatment.

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