The status as of today at the Summer Oncology Academy was presented on Wednesday by Prof. Maciej Krzakowski, MD, national consultant in clinical oncology, head of the Lung and Chest Cancer Clinic at the National Cancer Institute - National Research Institute in Warsaw, and president of the Polish Society of Clinical Oncology. As he said, according to data provided by provincial consultants in clinical oncology, we had 1116 specialists in June. It is clear that there is an uneven distribution, although the disparity is huge. More than a quarter of specialists (300) work in Mazovia, another 150 in Silesia. These are the only regions with more than a hundred specialists. According to the expert, the optimal minimum of specialists in this field should oscillate around 1,800.
What are the chances of increasing the number of specialists? At the moment there are 440 in the course of specialization. In autumn, 149 doctors should begin training. The number of specialty places is 596 - The biggest problem is that the specialty places are not being used. So we don't have enough specialists, and there is not enough interest in oncology. And this is a much bigger problem," the national consultant admitted. What's more, as other panelists pointed out, it's also a problem that a large number of young doctors decide to change specialties when they reach oncology departments. - This is a modular specialization. For 2.5 years, right now, a young doctor works in the internal medicine department. Then he comes to the oncology department and finds that "this is a work camp." And he starts thinking about changing his specialty," said Barbara Radecka, MD, head of the Clinical Oncology Department at the Opole Oncology Center. Jakub Kosikowski, spokesman for the Supreme Medical Chamber (oncology resident), pointed out that the problem is not only in clinical oncology. - Twenty-four people start their specialization in radiation therapy, and exactly half finish it, he said.
Experts were in no doubt that one of the root causes of this state of affairs is years of neglect at the pre-graduate training stage. It is only in recent years that programs have changed enough for students to become familiar with the modern possibilities of oncology and stop seeing the specialty as stigmatized by a hopeless diagnosis, leading to the patient's rapid death (and earlier suffering). But medical advances also have another side: the longer oncology patients live, the more cancers become chronic diseases, the more work oncologists have. And it is precisely this enormity of work, as Barbara Radecka admitted, that radically discourages young doctors from choosing or pursuing specialization. - Young people don't want to work beyond their means. Maybe a four-day work week in oncology would be some solution, she wondered.
Surely the solution would be to relieve oncologists and either eliminate some of the bureaucratic duties or transfer them to other professions. Doctors, as one could hear from Prof. Jacek Jassem, are able to prepare a catalog of such solutions on the spot. As an example of excessive bureaucracy, they cited, for example, the obligation to prepare full documentation of a patient appearing for drug administration every two to three weeks. Because of this, oncologists do, for example, the same work seven times as a surgeon does once, before performing a procedure on a patient.
