Indicative quotations: emerging flexibility of oncology as a specialty
| Participant | Indicative quotation |
| #2, Male, Early Career | In terms of I guess what I’m going to be doing [in the future], look, I see myself doing less direct patient clinical work. So at the moment, probably 85% of my week is direct patient care or activities. I’d probably want to see that down to about 50%. I’d want to be doing a lot more clinical research, particularly focused on regional and rural oncology outcomes. So I see myself really trying to pare back my clinical workload and do more research. |
| #19, Female, Consultant | I think within medical oncology it probably, as a whole, is reasonably flexible. So I think medical oncology is probably one of the specialities, I think, that is a lot more open to that than others. I mean when I was training everyone was full-time and it was, it was [laughs] not seen as difficult but there just wasn’t the options out there to do fractional work, whereas it is happening a lot more now and it’s just a part of life. |
| #11, Female, Advanced trainee | I’m all for maternity leave and feminism and work-life balance and working mums and all that but it just leaves everyone short and that makes it very tiring because you’re covering…it just means people who aren’t pregnant have to pick up extra work. |
| #7, Male, Consultant | Unfortunately, the penalty for that [career advancement through research], it doesn’t work for part-time workers. The feminisation of the workforce makes that pretty tough because I work about 80 to 100 hours a week in order to do both [clinical work and research]. |
| #14, Male, Early Career | I think there’s a lot more oncologists that are more comfortable doing point, two or three days a week, as opposed to where I’ve worked, most of the oncologists have been full-time or part-time oncologist, part-time research academic. But I think…it’s a lot more, I guess it’s a, pretty women heavy specialty, so there’s more acknowledgement that someone working three days a week is still fine. |
| #20, Male, Consultant | Certainly the number of female trainee oncologists has increased significantly. When I started [laughs], there was one female oncologist in New South Wales, trainee oncologist, and now the breakdown across the country…It’s very close. It’s very equivalent. We get a lot of female trainees, and they’ve seen the opportunity to go off and have families and all that. Certainly, it’s encouraged. It does make life a little bit interesting sometimes but it certainly hasn’t been a challenge to females coming in. A lot of females do see oncology as being good from a lifestyle because you don’t necessarily have to work full time but the opportunity to work in a sort of 0.5–0.6 FTE type position is certainly something that can be done, you know, perhaps it’s more of a challenge in other specialties. |
| #13, Female, Early Career | I think not many women will be taking on 1.0 s, if there were any. Most women would be taking on fractions. |