New Patient-Centered Care Standards from the Commission on Cancer: Opportunities and Challenges

The Commission on Cancer of the American College of Surgeons publishes accreditation standards that hospitals and cancer treatment centers implement to ensure quality care to cancer patients. These standards address the full spectrum of cancer care, from cancer prevention to survivorship and end-of-life care. The most recent revisions of these standards included new standards in "patient-centered areas," including the provision of palliative care services, treatment and survivorship plans, psychological distress screening, and patient navigation programs. Unified by their emphasis on the early identification of patients at risk of receiving suboptimal care and the importance of ensuring that issues arising during and after completion of cancer treatment are addressed, they are a welcome expansion of the standards guiding cancer care. As with all standards, however, the next steps will be to further define how they will be implemented and to determine how success will be assessed. This will require ongoing critical evaluation of the standards and their implementation, including the need for member institutions to define successful implementation methods and measurable outcomes and identification of areas most in need of further research.