Plus Pointers

Financial toxicity describes financial burden and stress caused by cancer treatment for patients and their caregivers. Financial distress may include lost wages or employment as a result of cancer, along with lost health insurance coverage. Helping patients navigate financial choices and challenges is a critical part of patient navigation. Unfortunately, many health care professionals are not comfortable asking about financial challenges and are not fully aware of resources available to support their patients' care. We invite you to learn how you can overcome this gap to better help your patients!

Awareness campaigns are wonderful ways to share important information with your community, but they can take significant time and energy to produce. GW Cancer Center is helping to make it easier for you to raise awareness during cancer awareness months through a series of comprehensive “plug and play” campaigns that do the legwork for you. Be sure to check out their campaigns for breast and lung cancer in October!

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted healthcare to an unprecedented degree. This article provides an overview of the burden of the pandemic on provider outlook and describes changes to survivorship care.

The GW Cancer Center offers updated training materials and resources for patient navigators.

We need to create a deep bench of healthcare leaders with diverse perspectives, otherwise we may impose a “minority tax” on minoritized people in visible leadership roles.

The perfectionist culture of medicine may “stigmatize” what is a “normal human response to struggle and failure.”

We need to use caution when we tell people to make healthy lifestyle choices, as the systems may not be set up to make the healthy option accessible and affordable.

The GW Cancer Center has a webinar series on professional development for oncology navigators.

The GW Cancer Center’s Online Academy offers a number of training and education opportunities for healthcare and public health professionals to help advance patient-centered care and evidence-based public health practice.