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Background: Survivorship care plans (SCPs) are written treatment summaries and follow-up care plans that are intended to facilitate communication and coordination of care among survivors, cancer care providers, and primary care providers. A growing number of guidelines for the use of SCPs exist, yet SCP use in the United States remains limited. Limited use of SCPs may be due to poor quality of these guidelines. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the quality of guidelines for SCP use, tools that are intended to promote evidence-based medicine., Methods: We conducted a comprehensive search of the literature using MEDLINE/PubMed, EMBASE (Excerpta Medica Database), and CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) published through April 2014, in addition to grey literature sources and bibliographic and expert reviews. Guideline quality was assessed using the AGREE II instrument (Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation, 2nd edition), a tool developed by an international group of scientists to advance the quality of clinical practice guidelines. To promote consistency with extant studies using the AGREE II instrument and to clearly and unambiguously identify potentially useful guidelines for SCP use, we also summarized AGREE II scores by strongly recommending, recommending, or not recommending the guidelines that we evaluated., Results: Of 128 documents screened, we included 16 guidelines for evaluation. We did not strongly recommend any of the 16 guidelines that we evaluated; we recommended 5 and we did not recommend 11. Overall, guidelines scored highest on clarity of presentation (i.e., guideline language, structure, and format): Guidelines were generally unambiguous in their recommendations that SCPs should be used. Guidelines scored lowest on applicability (i.e., barriers and facilitators to implementation, implementation strategies, and resource implications of applying the guideline): Few guidelines discussed facilitators and barriers to guideline application; advice and tools for implementing guidelines were vague; and none explicitly discussed resource implications of implementing the guidelines., Conclusions: Guidelines often advocated survivorship care plan use without justification or suggestions for implementation. Improved guideline quality may promote survivorship care plan use.

Background: Survivorship care plans are intended to improve coordination of care for the nearly 14 million cancer survivors in the United States. Evidence suggests that survivorship care plans (SCPs) have positive outcomes for survivors, health-care professionals, and cancer programs, and several high-profile organizations now recommend SCP use. Nevertheless, SCP use remains limited among health-care professionals in United States cancer programs. Knowledge of barriers to SCP use is limited in part because extant studies have used anecdotal evidence to identify determinants. This study uses the theoretical domains framework to identify relevant constructs that are potential determinants of SCP use among United States health-care professionals., Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews to assess the relevance of 12 theoretical domains in predicting SCP use among 13 health-care professionals in 7 cancer programs throughout the United States with diverse characteristics. Relevant theoretical domains were identified through thematic coding of interview transcripts, identification of specific beliefs within coded text units, and mapping of specific beliefs onto theoretical constructs., Results: We found the following theoretical domains (based on specific beliefs) to be potential determinants of SCP use: health-care professionals' beliefs about the consequences of SCP use (benefit to survivors, health-care professionals, and the system as a whole); motivation and goals regarding SCP use (advocating SCP use; extent to which using SCPs competed for health-care professionals' time); environmental context and resources (whether SCPs were delivered at a dedicated visit and whether a system, information technology, and funding facilitated SCP use); and social influences (whether using SCPs is an organizational priority, influential people support SCP use, and people who could assist with SCP use buy into using SCPs). Specific beliefs mapped onto the following psychological constructs: outcome expectancies, intrinsic motivation, goal priority, resources, leadership, and team working., Conclusions: Previous studies have explored a limited range of determinants of SCP use. Our findings suggest a more comprehensive list of potential determinants that could be leveraged to promote SCP use. These results are particularly timely as cancer programs face impending SCP use requirements. Future work should develop instruments to measure the potential determinants and assess their relative influence on SCP use.