AyniHealth white paper · Global edition
Rising demand,
finite people
Why meeting the global cancer burden depends on better systems, not harder work.
Projected increase in annual new cancer cases by 2050
The rate of increase differs sharply by setting. No health system anywhere is planning for a smaller workload.
113
radiation oncologists serving a population of 100 million in the Philippines, across 55 treatment centres.
141,077
radiation therapists the world will need by 2050 to deliver radiotherapy at current utilisation.
83%
of UK clinical directors unable to accept a fully funded scanner cited a lack of radiographers to operate it.
You cannot hire your way out
Rising demand is not, at heart, a technology problem, and that is the thing we too often get wrong. You can install another linear accelerator. You cannot simply install another radiation oncologist, physicist or therapist.
The training pipeline is constrained at both ends. Too few people are entering, and there is a recognised shortage of the senior educators needed to teach the ones who do. So recruitment on its own was never going to close this.
That leaves retention, and the amount of work it takes to treat each patient safely. This paper argues they are the same lever, because both come back to the quality of the systems people work inside.
Where the time goes
In practice, the time is rarely spent on the treatment itself. It is spent on the work required to support and maintain the workflow around it.
It is tracking down the latest version of a protocol to make sure the shared drive has the right file. It is pulling a senior therapist away from care to supervise, because there is no quick way to verify who else is checked off. It is repeating the same instruction for the fourth time this month, or filling out a competency form that never gets read again.
These are workarounds created to fill gaps between systems and processes. Most departments rely on a mix of five or six separate tools, email, shared folders, spreadsheets and legacy software, to manage operational updates. None of this inefficiency appears in standard capacity planning, but it consumes your team's most valuable resource, which is senior staff attention. Every hour an experienced clinician spends supervising routine tasks is an hour taken away from patient care, teaching, or improving clinic workflows.
What the paper covers
- The rising tidePublished incidence and projection data, globally and by region.
- You cannot hire your way outWorkforce requirements to 2050, and where the pipeline breaks.
- Where the time goesThe workarounds that fill the gaps between systems, and what they consume.
- The half-life of a skillCompetency degradation, and why dose and judgement raise the stakes.
- The problem is the shape of the systemWhy this is a design failure rather than a people failure.
- What an efficient system looks likeFour properties a team can build rather than buy.
- Efficiency is a retention strategyWhat the retention research finds, and why mid-career loss hurts most.
- Where to startQuestions that measure how much capacity your department spends absorbing change.
- Setting everyone up for successWhat changes when the system carries the load instead of the individual.
Who it is for
Written for radiation oncology clinical leads, department and service managers, chief radiation therapists, and the executives who own the capacity plan. It assumes you already know the clinical case for advanced practice and are asking how to make it routine.
Seven pages in total.