The Oncology Nursing Society is actually the largest organisation of professional oncology nurses in the world. We have close to 39,000 members. Our mission is to advance oncology nursing excellence and quality cancer care. Some of the things that we focus on are innovations in care, excellence in education for oncology nurses to keep them up to date with the latest treatments and advocating for the profession and our patients.
How do you see your organisation growing?
The Oncology Nursing Society is forty years old and we’re probably the oldest oncology nursing organisation there is and we have grown quite a bit over the past few years. But what happens is we have about 250 chapters so nurses have an opportunity at the local level to be involved with education, improving cancer care and networking with their peers. So that’s one of our major ways that we get out to our nurses. We have excellent journals; we have a yearly conference that we use to help with education and networking for our nurses. We also are involved in advocacy work on the national level and at the local level, promoting things like access to care and improved quality care.
Can you tell us more about your talk on building cancer nursing through national societies?
I’m doing a talk on building professional societies and capacity of cancer nursing. So one of the things I’m going to talk about and they wanted to ask for exemplars on advocacy work and the Oncology Nursing Society has had two great exemplars this past year. We’ve been quite involved in the Cancer Moonshot initiative in which President Obama charged Vice President Biden with the Cancer Moonshot initiative. The term moonshot is a little bit unfamiliar for some folks but the idea was, just as America sent people to the moon, we were going to make advances in cancer care, over a decade’s worth of advances in cancer care, within five years. So improve treatments, improve care, improve how care is delivered. So there was quite an initiative on how we want to plan to do that.
The Oncology Nursing Society was really key in making sure that our voices were heard and that we were able to keep the patient at the centre of the conversation. We had one of our members, a past President, was appointed to the Blue Ribbon panel and this is a panel of experts, oncology experts from all over the country, and we had a nurse on that panel with our voice. We also had nurses write in and share their perspectives that way. Vice President Biden went around the country and did listening posts throughout the country and we made sure there was a member on the panel at all those different listening posts. I personally have gotten to meet the Vice President twice in the past year and been able to convey the message of cancer occurs in a person and not just a cell and that the whole care environment is important. So how that care is delivered, how the patient is able to tolerate the treatments, how there are nurses there to support them with symptom management, those are key things.
Our involvement had a couple of good outcomes. There are ten recommendations from the Moonshot panel for what they want to move forward with. One of those is symptom management and that, as people know, is one of the key things that oncology nurses do. So having that be one of the major recommendations was wonderful to see that and we’re hoping to see advances in symptom management as a result. Another key recommendation that we’re pleased with and that we advocated for was increased prevention and early detection and, as we’ve already heard here at the conference, those are key things to advance how cancer care is tackled. If we can get cancer early we can help with interventions and treatments and even preventing it from occurring.
