Cancer Treatments

Through an interprofessional effort, ONS and NCODA have developed resources to assist practices in navigating the care of patients taking OAMs. The OAM Care Compass is a comprehensive collection of tools designed to help practices analyze their processes, design effective workflows, enhance patient education, and improve outcomes through standardized, high-quality care. 

“What I find most rewarding is connecting with nurses, who now understand the risks of exposure and are committed to minimizing their personal exposure. When I first started speaking about safe handling, there were a lot of nurses who were skeptical about the need for self-protection. I rarely see that now. Nurses are concerned for their own safety and more open to protective behaviors,” ONS member Martha Polovich, PhD, RN, AOCN^®-Emeritus, adjunct professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Maryland, told Liz Rodriguez, DNP, RN, OCN^®, CENP, ONS member and 50th anniversary committee member, during a conversation about the evolution of safe handling of hazardous drugs and ONS’s role in shaping safe handling policies.

“Although the patient is spending a little less time in the clinic, the administration ctually requires the nurse to be at the chairside the entire time. This has allowed nurses to spend potentially uninterrupted time to sit and converse with the patients that they may not have had with an IV infusion. It’s been a wonderful unintentional outcome from the development of the large-volume subcutaneous injections,” Crystal Derosier, MSN, RN, OCN^®, clinical specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston, MA, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS^®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a conversation about administering high-volume subcutaneous injections in cancer care.

“Under normal conditions, EGFR [epidermal growth factor receptor] is in an auto-inhibited state. And it’s only when it’s needed that it’s upregulated. But when you have cancers that there is either a mutation in the EGFR or an overexpression, what you see is a dysregulation of normal cellular processes. So you get overexpression or switching on of prosurvival or antiapoptotic responses,” Rowena “Moe” Schwartz, professor of pharmacy practice at James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, told Lenise Taylor, MN, RN, AOCNS^®, BMTCN^®, oncology clinical specialist at ONS, during a conversation about the EGFR inhibitor drug class.