Support for Cancer Patients

The Supportive Oncology Collaborative (SOC) is a consortium of healthcare professionals working together to improve supportive cancer care.

The SOC aims to assess and deliver psychosocial supports, such as counseling, to cancer patients and their families, from diagnosis throughout their lifespan. It also seeks to educate providers, patients and payers about the benefits of psychosocial services and to share findings and tools with healthcare professionals. Together we create and assemble resources for providers and patients and make them freely available on this website for the greater good.

 

History and Purpose

Over the past decade, national organizations such as the Institute of Medicine and the Commission on Cancer recognized the outsized role supportive oncology can play in improving cancer care and recommended supportive service delivery. This affirmed the Coleman Foundation’s long-held belief that supportive oncology services improve patients’ quality of life, improve quality of care, and frequently lead to reduced costs of care and to patients living longer with better quality of life.

The time was right to launch a major initiative. The Coleman Foundation convened Chicago-area cancer-care providers to learn what gaps prevented all cancer patients from receiving supportive services. This work led to the 2014 launch of the Supportive Oncology Collaborative, which the foundation funded to pursue the important work of designing and testing process improvements, creating screening tools and training, and advocating with payers to cover supportive care services.

In 2015, the Coleman Foundation initiated a Pediatric Supportive Oncology Collaborative to work towards improving supportive care services for children, adolescents, and young adults with cancer.

Since its establishment in 2014, the Supportive Oncology Collaborative has grown into a network of over 170 doctors, nurses, social workers, and advanced care professionals from over 40 diverse Chicago-area healthcare institutions.

 

About the Coleman Foundation

The Chicago-based Coleman Foundation, established in 1951 by former Fannie May Candies company owners Dorothy and J.D. Stetson Coleman, works toward its founders’ vision of creating opportunities that empower people to improve their quality of life in the Chicago area. Among the foundation’s tenets is supporting initiatives that give people power over their own paths through cancer care and treatment, along with programs for people with developmental disabilities and entrepreneurship education.

About Equal Hope

Equal Hope is an organization dedicated to the elimination of cancer racial and ethnic cancer disparities. We believe that all people should have an equal chance at surviving cancer and thriving. Our involvement with the Supportive Oncology Program is to ensure that as many people as possible including people of color and their healthcare providers know about these resources and have access to them.