Centering Compassion in Cancer Care

Well, I think we're in this era, right, where I have a 13-year-old daughter, so now I use the word era in a different way.

I guess one has to.

We're all in our Taylor Swift era.

Aren't we all in our Taylor Swift era? I think

it's just permanent now.

We are in our oncology era where, you know, I was seeing a statistic.

There's over 250 new drugs that have been approved in our space, right, in the last 20 years or so.

And that's remarkable.

And we've still got work to do.

But what we're also finding is this equilibrium between the challenge of being availability of interventions and accessibility of those interventions.

We really reached this inflection point where we have to think about both.

And as we think about both, that really means how do we make sure that people can get to that thing, stay on that thing, not be forever changed by that thing.

Because as we know, survivorship is growing, right, for sure.

We project at the ACS that that's gonna grow by another probably 20 million over the next 20 years or so.

What's interesting is that comes out to about 1,000 new graduates.

That's sort of the term I would use, right? People who graduate into survivorship per day.

Right, for the next 15 to 20 years.

So if you think about it that way, a thousand new people.

And so that's a mix, right, of people for whom, you know, have an early stage something surgically resected and they hopefully are not too worried about that.

There's folks who remain on therapy, right, for long periods of time.

And there's folks for whom, right, they're kind of in between.

That the cancer might have left their body but not necessarily their mind.

And as that goes on, we want to make sure that people feel well, are emotionally connected, socially connected, relationally doing well.

There's a lot of challenges, because I think we built oncology around these episodes right around six months or so, right? You think about the Hospice Medicare Benefit, which was created here in D.C.

in 1983, and as a palliative care doc, I think a lot about that.