The new standard of quality cancer care: integrating the psychosocial aspects in routine cancer from diagnosis through survivorship.

This article highlights recent findings from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences' evidence-based report Cancer Care for the Whole Patient: Meeting Psychosocial Health Needs published late in 2007. This landmark report lends new credibility to the field and its evidence-based clinical interventions, while outlining a new standard of quality cancer care which mandates that psychosocial aspects must be integrated into routine cancer care. Patients should be screened at their initial visit for psychosocial needs and survivors should have a treatment plan that includes attention to possible increased anxiety on completing treatment, development of posttraumatic stress symptoms, and mixed anxiety and depressive symptoms. Survivors with greater chance of psychosocial sequelae and diminished quality of life are those with chronic physical symptoms, physical impairment, or change in appearance or function. Referrals should be made to proper psychosocial resources (local when possible or by use of the support given by telephone from many site-specific cancer advocacy organizations with telephone help-lines).