Shikha Jain, Founder, Chair of the Board (Former CEO) at Women in Medicine and Associate Professor of Medicine at The University of Illinois Cancer Center, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“There are few careers where you are expected to move between cure, crisis, and end-of-life—sometimes within minutes.
That is oncology clinic.
One room: you are telling someone they are cancer-free.
The next: you are explaining that their disease has progressed.
Down the hall: a conversation about hospice, what matters, what quality of life looks like, how someone wants to prioritize the time they have.
Another: discussing clinical trials and coordinating treatment around a wedding, a graduation, a life milestone that cannot be moved.
And then, without warning, everything shifts.
A patient collapses during infusion. A code is called.
Same team. Same morning.
This is not unique to oncology, but oncology makes it impossible to ignore.
We ask clinicians to move seamlessly between hope, uncertainty, grief, and urgency, often within minutes, without pause, and without acknowledgment of the cognitive and emotional load that requires.
But here is the systems problem:
We have designed clinic templates, workflows, and productivity metrics as if these encounters are interchangeable. As if each visit carries the same weight, the same complexity, the same time requirement.
They do not.
Oncology simply exposes what is true across medicine: the variability and intensity of care are fundamentally mismatched with how our systems are built.
If we are serious about improving outcomes—for patients and for the workforce—we have to start designing for that reality.
Because right now, we are asking people to do some of the most complex work in healthcare inside systems that were never built to support it.
What would it look like if we actually designed for the reality of care?”
Other articles featuring Shikha Jain on OncoDaily.