Discussing Cancer Symptom Management With Nurse Darcy Burbage

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Cancer survivors often experience physical and psychosocial long-term and late effects after treatment ends.

Cancer survivors often experience physical and psychosocial long-term and late effects after treatment ends. Although most individuals experience some types of side effects during treatment, it is often surprising to survivors that some side effects can linger on after treatment is over, or can appear later on.

Nurses and patients have a lot to learn from each other to help us better understand and manage the effects of cancer treatment.

Please join our guest host Darcy Burbage (@DarcyBurbage on Twitter) as we discuss the challenges of treatment-related changes and share resources and advice.

Darcy is a survivorship nurse navigator and oncology nurse advocate, focused on bringing evidence- based strategies for quality survivorship care to oncology. Darcy guest blogs for Oncology Nursing News and also has written for the Association of Community Cancer Centers. She is a highly regarded nurse leader, currently serving as Chair of the ONS Communities Advisory Panel with the Oncology Nursing Society.

We hope to see you Thursday, July 7th on Twitter at 9 p.m. EST. Don’t forget to include the #CureConnect hashtag in all of your responses! Read more here about the #CureConnect chat and how to participate.

Tweet: I’ll be at the #CureConnect chat July 7 at 9pm EST with @cure_magazine and @oncnursingnews talking symptom management. Join me!
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For patients with cancer, the ongoing chemotherapy shortage may cause some anxiety as they wonder how they will receive their drugs. However, measuring drugs “down to the minutiae of the milligrams” helped patients receive the drugs they needed, said Alison Tray. Tray is an advanced oncology certified nurse practitioner and current vice president of ambulatory operations at Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey.  If patients are concerned about getting their cancer drugs, Tray noted that having “an open conversation” between patients and providers is key.  “As a provider and a nurse myself, having that conversation, that reassurance and sharing the information is a two-way conversation,” she said. “So just knowing that we're taking care of you, we're going to make sure that you receive the care that you need is the key takeaway.” In June 2023, many patients were unable to receive certain chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin and cisplatin because of an ongoing shortage. By October 2023, experts saw an improvement, although the “ongoing crisis” remained.  READ MORE: Patients With Lung Cancer Face Unmet Needs During Drug Shortages “We’re really proud of the work that we could do and achieve that through a critical drug shortage,” Tray said. “None of our patients missed a dose of chemotherapy and we were able to provide that for them.” Tray sat down with CURE® during the 49th Annual Oncology Nursing Society Annual Congress to discuss the ongoing chemo shortage and how patients and care teams approached these challenges. Transcript: Particularly at Hartford HealthCare, when we established this infrastructure, our goal was to make sure that every patient would get the treatment that they need and require, utilizing the data that we have from ASCO guidelines to ensure that we're getting the optimal high-quality standard of care in a timely fashion that we didn't have to delay therapies. So, we were able to do that by going down to the minutiae of the milligrams on hand, particularly when we had a lot of critical drug shortages. So it was really creating that process to really ensure that every patient would get the treatment that they needed. For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, an expert on CLL
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, and Josie Montegaard, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, experts on CLL
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