Ietje Perfors

185 Therefore, the GP is foreseen to play a larger role for patients, both during and after (curative) cancer treatment. Since cancer increasingly has a chronic instead of an acute nature, and since 70% of cancer patients suffer from other co-morbidities such as cardiovascular, lung, or metabolic diseases, in the future cancer care may be best delivered in the home environment, and from the hospital only when needed. Combined with the increased potential to deliver cancer treatment care at the patients’ home, a substantial part of the present cancer care pathway may even be transferred to primary care. If so, a transmural shared cancer care model with continuous GP involvement is adamant. Based on the experiences from the GRIP study, we have the following recommendations to facilitate these developments in future: • Collaborative effort is needed between the oncologist and the GP and their teams to ensure that the GP’s intervention is compatible to the care provided in hospital. Treating physicians and GP’s have to develop joint commitment to change the current care path, and support the implementation of this change in their daily practice. • The collaboration between the GP and the home care oncology nurses in the GRIP intervention was not yet matured. The task differentiation and delegation in cancer care needs to be further developed, both interprofessionally as well as between general practice and hospital care. Alternative approaches could be to organise a shared practice between primary care and hospital oncology nurse in primary care, or transmural care paths with oncologist consultation sessions in general practice. • Future interventions should be piloted first before a large scale evaluation is developed and assessed. Primary care involvement in cancer care is a developing field. This provides a lot of new opportunities for new cancer care models, new interprofessional and multidisciplinary collaborations and better patient participation. Even though the potential and need for primary care involvement seems obvious, we showed that the design, evaluation and implementation of new 7