The assessment aims to identify unmet needs and priority areas for improvement, informing future investment, policy and advocacy to strengthen care and support for childhood and adolescent cancer survivors.

Commissioned by Children’s Cancer CoLab and delivered by an independent consultant, this assessment will collect, analyse and report evidence on the current state of survivorship care across Australia. Its approach is guided by a national Expert Reference Group of clinicians, researchers and survivorship-care specialists, who provide methodological advice and help validate emerging findings.

The assessment will map what survivorship services exist across Australia, how they're delivered, and importantly, where they're missing altogether. The assessment will:

• Map hospital-based programs, primary care services, allied health, community health and charity-led supports for childhood and adolescent cancer survivors across states and territories.
• Build a National Survivorship Service Atlas – a comprehensive picture of what survivorship care and support services are available across Australia, and how they are organised and delivered.
• Identify where services are limited, hard to access or missing altogether, to reveal the scale of inequity in survivorship care.
• Benchmark current models of care against national and international best practice, and against the Survivorship Position Statement.
• Highlight exemplar programs worth scaling nationally, alongside practical recommendations for closing service gaps.

The assessment will quantify the financial and economic burden that childhood and adolescent cancer survivorship places on survivors, families and the broader health system. The assessment will:

• Estimate the lifetime economic cost of surviving childhood and adolescent cancer, looking at costs to the health system, survivors, families and government - including out-of-pocket expenses and lost income.
• Capture broader ripple effects, including reduced workforce participation, informal caregiving, and impacts on mental health and wellbeing.
• Use recognised health economic modelling methods over a lifetime horizon, reflecting how survivorship costs can extend for decades after treatment ends.
• Build a clear, evidence-based case for why investing in survivorship care makes sense for families, the health system, and the country.

The assessment combines direct consultation with services and survivors to build an evidence base grounded in both service delivery and lived experience, and will:

• Engage directly with hospital, primary care, allied health, community and charity-led survivorship services to understand how care is governed, staffed, funded and delivered, and how services connect across the care pathway.
• Engage directly with survivors and family members to understand their lived experience: what care they could access, what gaps or barriers they faced, and they wish had been available - through structured consultations and channels like CoLab's Patient and Family Advisory Committee.
• Triangulate service-led and lived experience input with desk research and data analysis, then validated with the Expert Reference Group and Survivorship Reference Group before finalising recommendations.