At the 2025 Academy of Oncology Nurse & Patient Navigators (AONN+) Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, Erin Price, LICSW, OSW-C, Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, Washington, D.C., discusses the most important issues facing advanced practice providers today, highlighting the difficulty in finding balance between system demands and prioritizing patient-centered care. 

Transcript:

My name is Erin Price. I'm an oncology social worker by training. I work at a cancer support nonprofit in Washington DC called Smith Center for Healing and the Arts.

One of the most challenging issues facing APPs is really just trying to balance and juggle all of the demands and the pressure within the medical system. It is incredibly hard to juggle all of these different demands and also feel like you have the opportunity to provide quality patient-centered care. 

What are these simple tools that we can use to help patients feel like they are getting a good quality experience with a provider? Also, so that the provider feels satisfied that they are providing that good quality care and aren't just on a time clock of having to just bounce from patient to patient.

From everything I hear within the system and all of the challenges that people are facing, I think just finding that balance and finding a way to juggle those demands. Most people are in this field because they want to provide good care, and yet the system is not set up always to allow for that. 

How do we make sure that we are able to sit and listen and hear patients and respond in ways that feel meaningful and helpful? At the end of the day, we all are trying to work towards the same goals.

Source:

Price E. Integrative Oncology in Practice: Whole-Person Approaches to Healing and Recovery. Presented at AONN+ Annual Conference; November 6-9, 2025. New Orleans, LA.