Personalised cancer care is usually framed as tailoring treatment to disease biology. This poster argues it should also mean tailoring the system around a patient, and that consumers are essential to achieving that, not just at a single design workshop, but as ongoing partners.
An early referral palliative care model of care was adapted to a regional Victorian cancer setting through co-design with clinicians, health service staff, and three consumer partners. Rather than treating consumer input as a one-off contribution to a fixed design phase, the three consumer partners have continued working alongside the project team, helping to shape education materials, contributing to staff and community education sessions, and advising on issues as they emerged in real-world use.
This sustained partnership has kept the model responsive to how patients and families actually experience care, not just how it was imagined at the design phase. Model adjustments and project guidance through ongoing consumer input reflect the kind of fine-tuning that a discrete co-design process, however well run, cannot achieve. In this project, consumer partnership functions as a personalisation mechanism in its own right. It continuously calibrates the service model against lived patient experience, in the same way precision medicine calibrates treatment against biological data.
This poster will share reflections from both the research team and the consumer partners on what sustaining this partnership required, and why treating consumer voice as an ongoing input, rather than a one-time consultation, is itself a form of personalising cancer care.