The Cancer Care Team

Abstract

The patient with cancer is not an isolated individual, living within a hospital ward or making regular visits to an out-patient clinic. He is part of the community where he lives with his family. He is employed in the community, and makes use of community resources. To consider the cancer patient as part of the community opens up new vistas for the management of such patients and adds further dimensions to the cancer problem. To visualise the cancer patient as part of the community means looking less at the individual problem and more at the overall impact of cancer at a population level.