Planning and organizing a multidisciplinary psychosocial oncology service

Providing psychosocial care to patients with cancer and their families is a formidable task given the current fiscal environment in hospitals. As the pool of available resources shrinks and populations shift from inpatient to outpatient, psychosocial staff are challenged to find creative, versatile, and efficient ways to deliver quality services and programs. This article describes the efforts to plan and implement psychosocial care at a cancer center facing the constraints of limited staff and decreasing resources. The background of the project, the development and implementation of a strategic plan, and a 1-year evaluation of the attainment of the objectives in the plan are described. The success of this approach and implications for psychosocial staff at other institutions are discussed.