Introduction
The Victorian Department of Health promotes a “whole of system” approach to cancer care coordination and the need to improve communication and integration between care services¹.
North Eastern Melbourne Integrated Cancer Service is a cancer clinical network adopting such strategies to engage primary and secondary care in strengthening information continuity to improve the quality of patient care.

Method
A variety of approaches have been implemented to ensure accurate and timely transfer of information between primary and secondary care clinicians. These include increasing the awareness of general practitioners in their requirements for referrals to secondary care; facilitating cancer multidisciplinary teams to routinely provide GPs with recommendations from their meetings and a region wide hospital audit reviewing the timeliness of discharge summary completion to assist secondary care teams to be more aware of their links with primary care.

Results
These approaches have resulted in consistent referral information and guidelines being available across three health services in the north eastern metropolitan region of Melbourne.
Cancer multidisciplinary teams routinely providing timely, concise summaries to GPs; real time feedback from over 100 GPs has assisted secondary care teams being more aware of how meeting outcomes can be better documented.
Providing secondary care clinicians with feedback on the timeliness of their discharge summary completion against other teams within their health service and compared to other health services in the region has resulted in a review of completion processes.

Conclusions
Cancer clinical networks help integrate primary and secondary care sectors to drive improvements in the provision of a more coordinated cancer care system.