Optimal Care Pathways for healthcare professionals
Optimal Care Pathways (OCPs) are designed to improve patient outcomes, by ensuring blood cancer specialists, treating hospitals, GPs and patients have access to the same, nationally consistent best practice treatment, care options and information across the country.
Optimal Care Pathways for blood cancer
✔ developed by Australia’s leading blood cancer specialists
✔ written alongside patient representatives
✔ endorsed by Federal, State and Territory health departments
✔ define optimal care for a patient diagnosed with a particular type of blood cancer.
Thanks to work recently completed by Australia’s Blood Cancer Taskforce, and previous work completed by the Cancer Council, there are now eight detailed Optimal Care Pathways available for blood cancer types. You can view all OCPs here, or download the relevant OCP below.
– Acute leukaemia in children, adolescents and young adults
– Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML)
– Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL)
– Chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML)
– Hodgkin and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma
– Low grade lymphoma – (including follicular lymphoma, marginal zone lymphoma and mantle cell lymphoma)
– Multiple myeloma
– Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS)
– Optimal Care Pathway for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with cancer
Access the Optimal Care Pathways in an interactive web app on your mobile or your desktop.
Quick reference guides
You can also find quick reference guides for each of these blood cancer types below.
These quick reference guides are a companion document to the full Optimal Care Pathway: a short reference document for quick access to information. You can view all quick reference guides here, or download the relevant quick reference guide below.
– Acute leukaemia in children, adolescents and young adults
– Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML)
– Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL)
– Chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML)
– Hodgkin and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma
– Low grade lymphoma – (including follicular lymphoma, marginal zone lymphoma and mantle cell lymphoma)
– Multiple myeloma
– Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS)
– Quick reference guide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with cancer
Access the quick reference guides in an interactive web app on your mobile or your desktop.
Guides to Best Cancer Care for your patients
You can also send this link to your patients (www.cancer.org.au/cancercareguides), encouraging them to download their relevant “Guide to Best Cancer Care”.
These are consumer versions, specially designed to help people in Australia with blood cancer, and their loved ones.
Optimal Care Pathways are one of the key recommendations in Australia’s National Strategic Action Plan for Blood Cancer. They will help you, as a health professional, provide nationally consistent, high-quality, evidence-based information at each stage of the blood cancer pathway, from diagnosis and treatment to ongoing care.
The impact of clear, accessible treatment information
“It’s important that medical advice and treatment options are available to everyone who enters the blood cancer arena.”
Graham, who was diagnosed with blood cancer in 2010, has suffered a severe decrease in physical ability due to his treatment – something he thinks could have been avoided had his treating team had a clearer direction.
“If everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet and following the best practice set out in an OCP,” says Graham, “those variables would have less impact.”