Medical Oncology Workload in Canada: Infrastructure, Supports, and Delivery of Clinical Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: In 2000, a Canadian task force recommended that medical oncologists (MOS) meet a target of 160–175 new patient consultations per year. Here, we report the Canadian results of a global survey of mo workload compared with mo workload in other high-income countries (HICS). Methods: Using a snowball method, an online survey was distributed by national oncology societies to chemotherapy-prescribing physicians in 22 HICS (World Bank criteria). The survey was distributed within Canada to all members of the Canadian Association of Medical Oncologists. Workload was measured as the annual number of new cancer patient consults per oncologist. Results: The survey was completed by 782 oncologists from HICS, including 58 from Canada. Median annual consults per mo were 175 in Canada compared with 125 in other HICS. The proportions of MOS having 100 or fewer consults or more than 300 consults per year were 3% (2/58) and 5% (3/58) in Canada compared with 31% (222/724) and 16% (116/724) in other HICS (p < 0.001 and p = 0.023 respectively). The median number of patients seen in a full-day clinic was 15 in Canada and 25 in other HICS (p = 0.220). Canadian MOS reported spending a median of 55 minutes per new consultation; new consultations of 35 minutes were reported in other HICS (p < 0.001). Median hours worked per week was 55 in Canada and 45 in other HICS (p = 0.200). Conclusions: Although the median annual clinical volume for Canadian MOS aligns with recommended targets, half the respondents exceeded that level of activity. Health policymakers and educators have to consider mo workforce supply and alternative models of care in preparation for the anticipated surge in cancer incidence in the coming decade.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".