Prof. Gevorg Tamamyan, Editor-in-Chief of OncoDaily, and the President of SIOP Asia and POEM Group, shared on LinkedIn:
Just Get Things Done!
In global institutions, and especially in healthcare, there is no shortage of plans, frameworks, and policies. What is scarce is execution. The gap between intention and delivery is where systems fail, and where lives are lost.
In medicine, time is the most precious thing. Cancer does not wait for another committee meeting, another feasibility study, another perfectly worded policy document. Time itself becomes one of the greatest killers.
10 years ago, when I returned home to Armenia, I had a clear purpose: to make pediatric oncology the strongest and fastest-developing field of medicine in the country. I was met with advice from every direction. Some of it was well-intentioned, some of it cautious to the point of paralysis. Questions ranged from the strategic to the abstract: Where will you put the toxic waste?
My answer was simple: I don’t have toxic waste yet. I have children with cancer who cannot wait.
At a moment when opinions were multiplying faster than progress, I received a piece of advice from a great friend of mine, Dr. Avo Artinyan, a world-known surgeon and then Chief of Colorectal Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, said to me: “Stop asking for advice. Just do it your way.”
And that is what we did.
It was difficult. The challenges were real—financial, structural, cultural, and institutional. But we started, and we moved forward.
‘Just do it,’ as the famous line goes. That became the strategy.
When we set out to build a national pediatric oncology fellowship program, we made a deliberate choice not to reinvent what already worked. We took established, proven training models from St. Jude, Dana-Farber, and the American Board. We merged them, adapted them to local realities, and said: This is enough. Let’s begin.
There were no endless pilot phases. No prolonged debates about hypothetical perfection. We launched the program. In the very first year, we enrolled seven fellows, top graduates from the medical school. They trained, they stayed, and they became the backbone of a growing system.
The results followed.
Looking back today, the outcome is clear and measurable: pediatric oncology became the fastest-developing field of medicine in Armenia. Survival rates improved. Workforce capacity expanded. Training became standardized. Most importantly, children received better, timelier care. And we had zero brain-drain.
This experience taught me a lesson that applies far beyond one country or one specialty. You can have the most elegant strategies. You can collect the best possible advice. But without execution, strategies become intellectual exercises, and patients pay the price.
Leadership is not about producing more documents. It is about shortening the distance between decision and delivery.
In healthcare, and in global health governance especially, the most powerful words are not “we plan to” or “we aim to.”
They are simply: Just get things done.