CREATE Childhood Cancer Rehabilitation Program development: Increase access through interprofessional collaboration

Cancer and its treatment can lead to functional limitations affecting ongoing development in children and adolescents. We developed a pediatric cancer rehabilitation program that integrates evidence-based rehabilitative care into cancer treatment. The program utilizes the CREATE (collaboration, rehabilitation/research, education, assessment, treatment, evaluation) Childhood Cancer Rehabilitation model. We aim to describe the structural and process components of our rehabilitation program and provide an access and utilization analysis.

To evaluate the rehabilitation program, we identified new patients with oncologic diagnoses from 2002 to 2019 using our database. To evaluate rehabilitative care, descriptive data, including the timing and type of rehabilitation services utilized within 5 years of a child's diagnosis, were collected and reviewed. Statistical analysis focused on change over time.

Among 1974 children assessed, 1580 (80.0%) received care from at least one rehabilitation service. Between 2002 and 2018, the percentage of children receiving rehabilitation services grew significantly throughout all disciplines, except for outpatient speech-language pathology. Utilization differed by age and diagnosis. Integrating therapists in the clinic improved patient access, reduced the time to access outpatient services, and increased the number of attended visits. Additional factors supporting program growth included: identifying leaders, using a prospective surveillance model, education, and program evaluation.

A multimodal interprofessional approach, such as the CREATE model, improves access to and the efficiency of evidence-based rehabilitation services promoting recovery, ongoing development, and quality of life.