We started a few years ago with an active collaboration with EHA and we are partners and we are trying to establish a stronger collaboration with physicians, with haematologists and also with nurses working in the field of haematology. We are trying to attract nurses, but also very important other healthcare professionals like physicians, to involve them into nursing care.
I’ve just heard from Sarah Liptrott about some of the patient advocacy sessions. Was there much feedback from nurses participating in these sessions or are there any other ways that you are finding nurses being involved in these partnerships that you’ve mentioned?
Nurses should in general be involved into developing trials; talking about clinical trials nurses should be involved in the developing of clinical trials. But, more important, that’s one of our main goals of the haematology nurses and healthcare professionals group to develop education which is accessible for nurses and other healthcare professionals all over the world. So what we have done is now and we introduced it also here at the EHA conference, we developed a learning programme for nurses and other healthcare professionals on multiple myeloma. We developed this programme as a self-training programme which can use nurses as a train the trainer principle. It has been developed in English but also translated into different languages like German, French, Italian, Spanish, to reach our goal that our learning tools are accessible for as many nurses all over the world. So nurses from the US, nurses from Asia, for example, and also nurses working in India because we have also accessible on our website so nurses and other healthcare professionals can go to our website and learn directly from our website. But the difference in some countries, for example in Europe, even now nurses don’t have access to the internet so that’s why we are also providing our learning materials with hard copies.
That website is www.hemcare.org and it’s easily accessible and there you can download the learning programme.
Our intention is that nurses in the future will have a stronger collaboration with physicians, with haematologists and that in the future it will be a hand-in-hand collaboration, that’s one of our main goals.
