Nursing Notes Live 2011 Year in Review

A look back at this year’s episodes, we pulled out some of the best statements about what nursing is and how we all can share our skills in a broader way with those around us, in both the facilities where we work, and our community at large.
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Early in 2011 I chatted with a panel of Oncology nurses including Jackie Grandt, Program Director, Outpatient Oncology Services at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center in California. Jackie shared her personal experience of the importance of nurses sharing their skills not just with helping patients but also through mentorship and clinical education of new nurses and nursing students.
Jackie:  How I got into oncology nursing was during the final rotation in nursing school on an oncology unit. It was during that experience that I really identified an oncology nursing that there’s many challenges and there’s many rewards. That was what I was looking for in my nursing career. I wanted to be challenged and I wanted to feel that – every day I was learning something new and definitely with what I’ve seen over 30 years on oncology nursing that that’s been very true. For our new person, I agree with you having opportunity to spend some time and rotate in that area while you’re in training is absolutely an excellent way. Also identifying people who are already working in the field then asking to spend some time with them and learning from them how they got into it and what they do on a day-to-day basis and even developing maybe some opportunities for mentorship if you decide to go into that area and get the support because oncology nursing and oncology treatment can sometimes be really overwhelming.
Along with mentorship is the importance of advancing your education and practice level as a nurse. As there is more and more focus on advanced practice nurses and the opportunities they might offer to improve health care systems nationwide, what opportunity and value is there for the patient care team to have access to resources like clinical nurses specialists.  Susan Bruce, a clinical nurse specialist in oncology at Duke Raleigh Cancer Center in North Carolina shared her thoughts on why access to clinical nurse specialists is so important as “Change Agents” improving patient care and outcomes.
Susan:  There’s a lot of ambiguity with the clinical nurse specialist’s role in whatever setting you are in. In periods of time, they’ve done away with the clinical nurse specialist only to find out, five or ten years later, it’s that long, “Boy, we really need those people back.” We do offer a value, I think, to the institution. We are a change agent. We help to make change occur. With nurse practitioners, the world’s pretty clearly defined, the nurse practitioners of these patients in the clinic setting every day or whatever. The clinical nurse specialist, I think, just really adds so much more. Who is going to bring the evidence to the bedside if it’s not the clinical nurse specialist? Clinical nurse specialists look at systems as a whole. How do we implement this in the system? Whether I have an idea that I think would work good in the outpatient setting, is it something that could be incorporated in to the inpatient setting to help those people as well both nurses of those patients. It’s about the collaboration, I think – extending that information.
But I really think we do have a very strong emphasis on keeping up with the evidence and ensuring that that gets into practice. I find that I’m doing that a lot in our setting, reviewing what standard of care is and how does that impact the way we pr...