WCLC 2025 - Posters & ePosters-EP.15.06 Bridging the Gap: Co-Designing Tools to Improve Equity in Lung Cancer Screening Care Pathways

Pdf Summary

This study by Ambreen Sayani et al. addresses the critical gap in lung cancer screening equity in Canada by co-designing tools to integrate lung cancer screening referrals into the Smoking Treatment for Ontario Patients (STOP) program. Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related death in Canada, with late-stage diagnoses prevalent. Low-dose CT (LDCT) screening reduces mortality by about 20% among high-risk individuals but suffers from low uptake. The Ontario Lung Screening Program (OLSP) offers LDCT screening, yet its referral process is fragmented and disconnected from STOP, Canada's largest smoking cessation program with over 400,000 participants documented via electronic medical records (EMR).<br /><br />The project's goal is to bridge this gap by leveraging STOP’s extensive reach and data to systematically identify eligible individuals and embed decision-support tools into STOP workflows, creating a bidirectional pathway between smoking cessation and cancer screening. Using a patient-partnered, interdisciplinary qualitative approach guided by Trauma and Violence-Informed Care principles, the team engaged STOP and OLSP providers, patients, and key informants in co-design sessions to develop practical, trauma-informed provider prompts and patient scripts, alongside an implementation plan.<br /><br />Outputs include provider-facing prompts integrated into STOP’s EMR and patient-facing scripts to facilitate sensitive referral conversations. The implementation plan supports tool integration, training, and scalable adoption. This integration aims to improve provider workflows, enhance communication, increase LDCT screening access for underserved populations, and ultimately reduce lung cancer mortality through earlier detection.<br /><br />The study highlights a novel, equity-focused solution aligning chronic disease prevention with early cancer detection, fostering care coordination across provincial systems. With a multidisciplinary collaboration of researchers, clinicians, policy makers, and patient partners, this initiative exemplifies patient-centered design to improve health equity and screening uptake in lung cancer care pathways in Canada.

Asset Subtitle

Ambreen Sayani

Meta Tag

Speaker Ambreen Sayani

Topic Multidisciplinary Care: Nursing, Allied Health and Palliative Care

Keywords

lung cancer screening

lung cancer mortality

low-dose CT (LDCT)

Smoking Treatment for Ontario Patients (STOP) program

Ontario Lung Screening Program (OLSP)

electronic medical records (EMR)

screening referral integration

trauma-informed care

health equity

patient-centered design