Dr. Adeboye Ogunseitan has taken the reins as the chief of the division of supportive medicine at the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, California.
City of Hope is among the top cancer treatment centers in the world. When the opportunity arose for Ogunseitan, it was an easy choice to move from his job at Northwestern University Medical Center in Chicago to City of Hope.
“There were two separate attractions. One was for the City of Hope itself as an institution, and the second one was for the Supportive Medicine Program at the City of Hope,” Ogunseitan told Palliative Care News.
The physician cited City of Hope’s founding as a tuberculosis center, where people with grim prognoses went for treatment.
“It wasn’t called City of Hope when it was founded, but it really engendered and embodied the concept of hope for people who no one else would care for. And that I found attractive,” he said.
The cancer center, which has branches in several major cities, already had an extensive supportive care department.
“The City of Hope had over time devised a model of pulling together all the teams and all the many different groups of people that are needed to help cancer patients have meaningful lives as they go through their cancer treatment and beyond and put them under one umbrella,” he said.
Two incidents in Ogunseitan’s past proved formative in his interest in palliative care.
The first happened when he was a young teenager. His grandmother fell and broke her hip. It fell to his family to provide the post-op care.
“A surgeon had instructed me, particularly. He looked at me and said, ‘You must make sure she does not move, because if she does, she will disrupt the repair that we had just done and would have to go back to the operating room,’” he said.
The result: He spent the next 12 hours holding her still, in spite of the pain and discomfort from the surgery. Years later, as he was leaving for school, she referred to that night.
“I can’t still carry this thing that my grandmother went to her grave and was thinking of me as the guy who pinned her down all night and caused her pain. That was because the pain management she got was nonexistent, inadequate — to be too generous,” he said.
The second happened while he was living in London. A friend was diagnosed with bone cancer and was confined to hospital. For months, Ogunseitan and a circle of friends visited regularly. They became friendly with the staff and the caregivers. Despite that familiarity, it came as a shock when his friend took a sudden turn and died.
“Not once did anybody ever approach the topic that not only was he not going to recover from his cancer, but he was also dying,” he said.
At City of Hope, Ogunseitan is running one division within the Department of Supportive Medicine. It is a department that brings together physicians, nurses, psychologists, aestheticians and other disciplines, all with a singular purpose.
“We have a vast array of disciplines, but I’m brought together with the singular purpose of ensuring that cancer patients have the best possible care and support they can get as they get their cancer care,” Ogunseitan said.
Three months into his job at City of Hope, he has begun to clarify and establish goals and priorities for the division.
First, Ogunseitan wants to deepen and enhance the integration of his division within the Department of Supportive Medicine. The structure and the talent exist. Incumbent on him is to make sure that the structure operates at maximum efficiency.
Second, he wants to help his staff improve as academicians. Palliative care methods and models developed at City of Hope should be used to help other institutions, he said.
“City of Hope is a national leader, and part of being a national leader is advancing the field of knowledge, helping establish why things work, how they work and pushing that out so that others who do not have resources or capabilities can still deliver the best care that they can,” Ogunseitan said.
According to Ogunseitan, looking forward, he wants to be part of an effort to make supportive/palliative care more accessible. Right now, he pointed out, supportive medicine is most often available adjacent to major teaching centers.
Expanding that access to supportive care to people outside the orbit of those major teaching hospitals is a natural next step.
“As palliative medicine has grown, and it has grown in the last 20 years, it hasn’t been able to grow enough to meet the demand within those major centers, let alone expanding outwards from those major centers,” Ogunseitan said.
For colleagues within his field, he believes the growth and expansion of palliative care will be aided by an ability to show, empirically, the effect and efficacy of palliative care. With that, more doors will open.
“The better we can attract the funding that we need to expand the work that we do and to expand the boundaries of our knowledge doing that” Ogunseitan said. “We also need to be more attentive to areas. Again, I come back to safety and quality, which means a lot to me that we are able to demonstrate that we’re providing safe and effective care to the patients that we have, because that, again, does some of the things I talked about earlier.”
