The breast cancer incidence in Hong Kong has been rising for the past 30 years. In 2021, women in Hong Kong have a 1 in 13 lifetime risk of developing invasive breast cancer (BC) before the age of 75a. The good news is, BC death rates have remained consistently low, but this also means our SOPD is currently taking care of many BC survivors who live long but endure a spectrum of physical, psychological and functional sequel of the disease and its treatment, which we are unable to address fully in our busy clinics.
The Hong Kong Cancer Strategy has set out the direction to improve cancer survivorship care in 2019. KWC Oncology, hand-in-hand with KWC Community Health Care Office, and our community partners, have responded with several pilot projects aimed at establishing sustainable medical-social service models to care for cancer survivors in the community.
The District Health Centre (DHC) - KWC Breast Cancer Survivorship Program was piloted in 2021 with Sham Shui Po DHC to address rehabilitation needs and provide psychosocial support for BC survivors. The program structure, bi-directional referral mechanisms, methods of staff training and patient promulgation, were original designs. Expanding in scale ever since, the program is currently available in all 3 DHCs in Kowloon West, and can benefit all non-metastatic BC survivors younger than 70 years-old who have follow up at oncology and surgery SOPDs in KWC. Over 200 patients had been referred to these program, with more than half eventually enrolled and providing encouraging feedback.
The "CONNECT": KWC-HKMA Hospital-to-Community Cancer Survivorship Program was piloted in February 2025, in which long term BC survivors are being referred to community doctors, who received structured training from KWC oncologists, for regular follow-up. The preparatory work of this project included a survey on perceptions of local community doctors in providing care for cancer survivors. Among the 109 practitioners, 63% were interested in providing shared-care to cancer survivors, and top five facilitators for developing a shared-care model were identified.
In this presentation, the hurdles in piloting the DHC Survivorship Program and the CONNECT Program, the current state of affairs, patient feedback, details of the aforementioned survey, and our vision that fuels these efforts, will be shared.
