The age old question! Your foci need to be:
1. What is legally required in your state as far as cancer
reporting, and how much of what resources are required to keep your
hospital in compliance with state law.
2. Is your hospital CoC approved or not? The new standards will
require you, after June of this year, to maintain a 6-month or less
interval between date first seen and date abstracted. Repeat often
that all of the new CoC standards are mandatory, following up with a
clear but short explanation of approval status categories. Identify
any other standards you know your registry or your program presently
doesn't meet (or will definitely have trouble meeting). Then note
what it would take to achieve and maintain compliance with those
standards.
Another thought . . . does your cancer program have a long term
follow up clinic? If so, do you send follow up letters to patients?
We do have such a clinic and do send letters to patients. Whenever
they note a concern, we provide them with info on how to obtain an
appointment in our long term follow up clinic (of course if it is
dire, such as someone who feels suicidal, we'd give the letter
straight to a clinician to deal with). So although we don't get to
charge, we DO bring about patient visits which are a good money maker
for the hospital. Similarly, our tumor boards function as a regional
consult service for a multi-state area. The work the registry staff
does to prepare summaries and obtain the outside materials to be
reviewed facilitates some of those consult cases coming to our
facility for some or all of their cancer care.
Keep at it - I know it is a very tough problem.
-- Theresa
--- In cancerregistrargroup@yahoogroups.com, "careg3" <careg3@y...>
wrote:
> Hi,
> Does anyone out there have any ideas of how to educate
administrators
> about the needs and functions of a Cancer Registry? We have been
> trying at our facility, but our efforts have obviously failed as we
> have faced cuts in our staff that will severely impact our ability
to
> function daily and get ready for survey this year. Any thoughts
> would be greatly appreciated.
> Maryann