Project Summary
While many survivors are highly motivated to seek information about dietary changes to improve their long-term health, cancer survivors in the United States have poor adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. This gap between a desire for improved health and poor dietary habits highlights the strong need for identifying and addressing barriers for cancer survivors adhering to dietary guidelines. The mission of Project Nutritional Needs of Cancer Survivors (NNOCS) is to improve the quality of life and long-term health of cancer survivors through improved nutrition. To achieve this mission, we aim to build partnerships with cancer survivors, caregivers, healthcare providers, policy makers, and payers who are engaged in learning about the complex web of factors that influence the nutritional status of cancer survivors. The partnership is being developed in anticipation of the partners’ involvement in discussions and decisions to identify priority research questions and innovative, community-responsive research designs. In Tier II, we will move our partnership forward toward patient-centered comparative effectiveness research (CER) questions. Meetings will be held to identify partners, resources, and steps involved in moving forward each CER idea, such as improving patient-centered communication on nutrition in clinical care, improving patients’ access to evidence-based nutrition recommendations, and improving healthcare professionals’ knowledge about nutrition and cancer survivorship. The partnership is expected to translate CER ideas into one or two viable CER questions. In addition, we plan to expand communications with the larger community that our partnership members represent via webinar, Twitter chats, and a project website, and to identify and engage national stakeholders for dissemination.