Jia Jenny Liu, Conjoint Associate Professor at UNSW, Translational Lead at The Kinghorn Cancer Centre, and ESMO Leadership Development Programme Participant, shared on LinkedIn:
“One of the things I love about being an Associate Editor at BMJ Oncology is thinking not only about what we publish, but whose voices are represented in the oncology literature.
This piece by Rick Bangs, ‘Addressing the hidden toxicities of cancer: a call to action for clinicians, researchers and clinical trialists’, is a great example.
Cancer treatment has burdens that are not always captured neatly in a CTCAE table or a Kaplan-Meier curve.
Time, financial and social toxicity, treatment burden, uncertainty, and the impact on families can all matter enormously to patients.
And sometimes the person best placed to articulate that isn’t another oncologist.
I’d love to see more oncology papers authored or co-authored by patients and people with lived experience, not simply included at the end of the research process, but helping shape the questions, interpretation and message.
And this needs to start even earlier.
More clinical trials should be designed WITH patients.
Helpful article by Karen Woolley: ‘One hand doesn’t know what the other is doing: Finding clinical trials designed WITH patients’.
So, wearing my BMJ Oncology Associate Editor hat: if you are a patient advocate, researcher or clinician with an idea where lived experience genuinely belongs alongside scientific or clinical expertise, please consider us.
Patient-centred research should include patients not only as participants.
Sometimes they should be authors too.”
Title: Addressing the hidden toxicities of cancer: a call to action for clinicians, researchers and clinical trialists
Author: Rick Bangs
