The oncology community stands at a pivotal moment. Breakthroughs in prevention, early detection, treatment, and survivorship have reshaped what it means to live with cancer. Increasingly, cancer is no longer an acute episode but a chronic—and often survivable—condition. This remarkable progress has resulted in a rapidly expanding population of patients and survivors who require ongoing, complex, and coordinated care. Meeting these needs will require more than incremental improvements; it will demand intentional design across the entirety of our systems. This is the foundation of my 2025-2026 presidential theme for the year: Designing Oncology Care to Meet the Needs of a Growing Patient Population.
ACCC remains steadfast in ensuring that every patient has access to high-quality, coordinated cancer care—no matter where they live, the setting in which they receive care, or the complexity of their disease. With our expansive network of multidisciplinary cancer care professionals across community-based, academic, rural, and integrated delivery systems, ACCC is uniquely positioned to lead the transformation our field requires.
A principal component of designing oncology care for the future is empowering and sustaining the workforce. The oncology workforce is our field’s cornerstone, yet it faces mounting pressures: workforce shortages, high patient acuity, administrative burden, and rising emotional fatigue. These realities threaten the sustainability of even the most exceptional cancer programs.
True empowerment begins with enablement. Physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, pharmacists, navigators, social workers, genetic counselors, and other allied professionals must be supported through education, role optimization, leadership development, and practice environments that allow them to contribute at the top of their expertise. When interdisciplinary teams are supported and aligned, access improves, outcomes strengthen, and our collective capacity becomes more resilient as volumes rise.
This leads us to an often-overlooked upstream threat: protecting the educational pipeline for oncology’s multidisciplinary teams. Recent federal proposals to revise the definition of “professional degrees”—which would reduce federal borrowing limits for graduate nursing and other health care professions—pose a real risk to the future of cancer care. Modern oncology depends on highly trained professionals whose graduate and doctoral preparation is essential to team-based practice. Limiting access to the education required for these roles creates barriers at a moment when workforce shortages are already widespread.
Equity suffers, as these changes disproportionately impact students from underrepresented and economically disadvantaged communities. ACCC views equitable access to professional education as both a workforce and a patient care imperative. We will continue engaging policymakers to ensure financing policies reflect the realities of contemporary cancer care and the multidisciplinary teams that make it possible.
The downstream consequences are significant: reduced patient access to supportive and palliative services, longer wait times for patients, increased provider burnout, and fragmented care.
As part of our advocacy agenda, ACCC will continue to engage policymakers to educate them on these critical issues.
Our future hinges on our collective willingness to design care intentionally. By empowering the workforce and protecting the educational pathways that sustain it, we can ensure that patients continue receiving the care they deserve. This work is fundamental to meeting the needs of our growing patient population—and to designing the future of oncology care together.
