Congress Abstracts 2003

13

BEYOND ORIENTATION: SUPPORTING THE NEW AND EXPERIENCED ONCOLOGY NURSE. Krista Rowe, RN, BSN, and Ellen Cowan, RN, BSN, OCN^®, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC.

Standards and guidelines exist to identify best practice in patient care. Evidenced based practice relies on utilizing those standards to improve care for a specific patient population. However, providing consistent nursing care, based on those standards, to the oncology patient population in a tertiary care medical institution can be a challenging task for both new and experienced nurses. Although the individual challenges vary significantly, both groups of nurses working with the adult hematology oncology and solid tumor patient population at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina identified the potential value of an easy-to-use reference guide highlighting topics pertinent to the care of their patients. As a result, a group headed by the oncology nurse educator and made up of staff nurses, nurse managers, and clinical nurse specialists, came together to create such a guide. A 160-page pocket reference was created using standards of practice laid out by the Oncology Nursing Society, evidence-based institutional policies and procedures, and well-known oncology reference materials. It contained a wide variety of topics including scope of practice, chemotherapy administration, side effect management, and oncology emergency management. The goal of this project was to reference consistent oncology nursing practice, support the new nurse during and after completing the orientation process, and strengthen uniformity in practice of the experienced nurses. This presentation will discuss the effectiveness of this guide by evaluating user satisfaction from the standpoint of the new graduate nurse as well as the experienced oncology nurse. It will also discuss the impact of such a tool on consistency of nursing practice for an inpatient medical oncology unit.