A collaborative pilot project between professors from two Michigan universities aims to give women support after completing breast cancer treatment.
The project, Transition to Survivorship - Following Breast Cancer Treatment, acts as a trial-run support group for women who have recently gone through treatment after the early stages of breast cancer. Group members can offer other women ways to cope after chemotherapy, radiation, a lumpectomy or mastectomy.
“Women have a lot of problems with not having a lot of continued follow-up,” said Barbara Given, an MSU nursing professor and director of the MSU project site. “They were really not quite ready to be let go. It’s a program to help to reach wellness and to help them get back into their usual roles.”
Given, with her husband Charles, worked as co-investigators on the study. The principle investigator for the project is Bernadine Cimprich, a University of Michigan School of Nursing professor .
“It’s been a really productive collaboration,” Cimprich said. “We were just testing the feasibility of this.”
There will be three different test groups in the next few months to prove to hopeful investors the project is worthwhile, Cimprich said. Each group is made up of eight women who are over 25 and have recently completed treatment for early breast cancer stages, she said. The seven-week program entails participating in three telephone interviews, two support group sessions and two other telephone calls with a health educator.
Registered nurse Jill Blair is the health educator consulting the women during the program.
“This is really a program designed to help women make important transitions in their life,” she said. “This is pretty new and ground-breaking research that’s being done though MSU and U-M,”
The first group was completed in August, and Cimprich said they are now recruiting women for their next session, which begins Oct. 24.
“We really hope we’ll find what women want and need during this time and set up a program,” Given said. “They all believe they need something.”
Funding for the project comes from the Walther Cancer Institute in Indiana, and the women involved aren’t required to pay any fee or given any monetary reward.
Blair said the program has been effective so far, and she hopes more cancer-treatment centers and hospitals will take their lead and begin post-treatment breast cancer support groups.
“It just helps women improve their quality of life and helping them go to a ‘new normal’ as I call it,” she said. “And there is a need for it.”
Cimprich said the group is going through a period of trial and error, especially with the first group of women telling them what worked and what didn’t. In addition, Cimprich and Given have developed a workbook to answer survivors questions.
“The comments were really touching,” Cimprich said. “That seems to have been a very successful workbook. We use the information we got from the pilot and fixed (the problems). Now we’re actually going to test it.”
