Abstract

Background: Rural cancer survivors may face greater challenges receiving survivorship care than urban cancer survivors.

Purpose: To test for rural versus urban inequities and identify other correlates of discussions about cancer survivorship care with healthcare professionals.

Methods: Data are from the 2017 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), which included a cancer survivorship supplement. Adult survivors were asked if they discussed with a healthcare professional 5 components of survivorship care: need for follow-up services, lifestyle/health recommendations, emotional/social needs, long-term side effects, and a summary of treatments received. The Behavioral Model of Health Services guided the inclusion of predisposing, enabling, and need factors in ordered logit regression models of each survivorship care variable.

Results: A significantly lower proportion of rural than urban survivors (42% rural, 52% urban) discussed in detail the treatments they received, but this difference did not persist in the multivariable model. Although 69% of rural and 70% of urban survivors discussed in detail their follow-up care needs, less than 50% of both rural and urban survivors discussed in detail other dimensions of survivorship care. Non-Hispanic Black race/ethnicity and time since treatment were associated with lower odds of discussing 3 or more dimensions of survivorship care

Conclusions: This study found only a single rural/urban difference in discussions about survivorship care. With the exception of discussions about the need for follow-up care, rates of dis- cussing in detail other dimensions of survivorship care were low among rural and urban survivors alike.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2024

Notes/Citation Information

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License 4.0 (CCBY-NC-ND), where it is permissible to download and share the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be changed in any way or used commercially without permission from the journal.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1097/MLR.0000000000002014

Funding Information

This project was supported by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP), the Health ReSources and Services Administration (HRSA), the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under cooperative agreement number U1CRH30041. The in- formation, conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and no endorsement by FORHP, HRSA, HHS, or the University of Kentucky is intended or should be inferred.

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