Offering survivorship care plans when active cancer treatment ends has been recommended as a best practice to optimize quality health care for cancer survivors. Yet, recent systematic reviews of randomized control trials assessing the effect of survivorship care plans were generally negative on patient reported outcomes.

Most of these care plans provided treatment summary, information on health care and surveillance recommendations only, seldom emphasising management of persistent treatment effects and late effects, or health maintenance and promotion. Studies examining content preferences in survivorship care plans showed survivors prefer more health promotion and psychosocial support content.

Hence, the limited evidence that survivorship care plans improve health outcomes may arise from mismatched content preference. One of the current JCICC studies, using a sequential multiple assessment randomized controlled trial (SMART) approach, evaluates a cancer survivorship care intervention on physical symptom distress and health-related quality of life among Chinese patients recently completed curative cancer treatment.