More than 80 million people in Europe live with mental ill-health, constituting a leading public health in Europe. Additionally, 4 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed every year, with cancer being the second most common cause of death. There is an overlap between these two burning public health issues, as people with mental-ill health report both higher incidence of cancer and experience higher levels of cancer mortality. This excess burden is linked to increased engaging in risky health behaviors, as well as experiencing significant barriers when accessing often highly fragmented health care systems. These barriers include discrimination and stigmatization of people living with mental-ill health as well as biases from healthcare professionals that is often operationalized as “diagnostic overshadowing” – a form of bias that leads healthcare professionals to ascribe somatic symptoms and complaints as mental health issues.
Timely and evidence-based preventive strategies, including optimizing healthcare pathways, service integration provide solutions to reduce the high cancer morbidity and mortality in disadvantageous populations, such as people with mental-ill health. The aim of the CO-CAPTAIN project is to co-create, define and implement an innovative solution based on the Patient Navigation Model, which is an evidence-based, patient-centred intervention supporting patient empowerment via removal of systemic barriers, provision of social support, improving health literacy and promoting timely access to primary cancer prevention. The CO-CAPTAIN project is based on implementation science frameworks and framed as a feasibility pilot intervention in four different European countries; Austria, Greece, Poland and Spain. Results of the intervention should be used to create a transformative new integrated care pathway for primary cancer prevention in an underserved population.
