The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer screening and surveillance
cancer
CANCER
The COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020 and the study, along with cancer screening and surveillance overall, was greatly affected. Details have been documented elsewhere [You know, I’ve offered a few of them, like, just to come in for a blood pressure reading and they are hesitant and just … a few people haven’t wanted to do their appointment at all and wanted to wait a while. So, it’s just been at the back of the queue. [PP, KI031, ON]However, this may have been more of an issue at the start of the pandemic before a vaccine was available and when fewer treatment options existed. Physicians and PPs eventually noted their attempts to catch up on screening and clear the backlog was received positively by patients.Yeah, most of my patients who I've asked them to come in have been coming in. I haven't had too many where they're like, ‘oh, I don't want to come in because of the pandemic’. I think that happened a lot more in the first six months I want to say. But I would say that since the summer… I have started essentially calling my patients that were due for screening. I still manage a lot on the phone, but those who need their mammograms and their PAP smears and their FIT tests and stuff, we're ordering them [PP, KI048, AB]One PP expressed concern about the isolation of immunocompromised cancer survivor patients during the COVID-19 lockdown.[Prevention visits] were very sad because that's exactly the population that was extremely high risk, because [two cancer survivor patients] both had other issues after the cancer, [being] immunocompromised. Just like so isolated, so missing the freedom to go somewhere without being afraid, like they don't even go grocery shopping. I just liked to talk to them and try to, I don't know, give them a new voice to listen to [PP, KI034, ON]At the time of final data collection, some clinics had not yet returned to outreach screening and were still screening opportunistically. Some physicians and PPs commented that they expected some fallout due to paused or delayed screening during the pandemic and expected to see a higher number of pathologies over the next few years.I think down the road, yes, the screening is, there’s a two-year gap in how much screening people have done. I’m sure there’s going to be a bit of a fall out from that over the next two years when the screening gets done. I would think the pick-up things might be a little bit higher, but I think for us, what we’re seeing in healthcare right now is we’re seeing more acute presentations of illness like in emergency here right now, emerg[ency] is kind of overwhelmed [Physician, KI040, NL]As a result of pandemic backlogs for screening and routine health visits, physicians believed that PPs would be especially useful at this time to reach out to high-risk patients, patients with overdue screening, and to improve screening practices at the clinic overall.I think [having a prevention practitioner] would be an interesting or a very useful addition potentially to primary care practice if we could find a way to make that work, especially right now during COVID. I think, well we're trying to do, what we can in terms of catching people with screening or preventative health as we see them for issues, like we haven't really been doing routine physicals, which is normally when all of this preventative health and screening would have been done. So especially now when we're still limited in terms of office visits and there's still all these other kind of more acute issues that are kind of taking up more office time, I think it would be useful to have like this Prevention Practitioner if it was available to reach out to certain high risk group patients to ensure that they are up to date with their screening. [Physician, FG005, ON]