Recipients of ONS Foundation Funding

Linda Sarna, RN, DNSc

Dr. Linda Sarna has made a difference. Her research regarding women and lung cancer, quality of life for survivors, as well as her work with tobacco cessation has changed policy, informed health care providers and decision makers, heightened awareness of important issues, and provided a foundation for continuing research. The Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) Foundation sponsored her early work, which has had significant impact on future research and funding for lung cancer and tobacco control studies.

Dr. Sarna became an oncology nurse early in her career because there was a job opportunity on the oncology floor! Subsequently, she worked at NCI during the 1970's when bone marrow transplant was still experimental and combination chemotherapy was in its early phases. She commented that one thing that drew her to oncology nursing was that there were such exciting things happening in treatment advances and the need for skilled nursing care. Her early experiences led her back to school to receive a Master's degree with a thesis study on Hopes of Terminally Ill Patients. This work in the 1970's exposed her to many women with lung cancer, and she recognized this as an understudied group. When she returned to school for her doctorate, she focused on the older cancer person with lung cancer undergoing chemotherapy. A post dissertation study specifically looked at the differences nurses could make with a focused assessment for patients with advanced lung cancer.

Dr. Sarna's work with people with lung cancer continues. She was the first researcher to describe quality of life and survivors of lung cancer. This study, funded by National Cancer Institute, was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Her current research, funded by the ONS Foundation, describes the symptom experience of patients recovering from thoracotomy for lung cancer. Additionally, she and her team received the 2006 Oncology Nursing Society's Publishing Excellence Award for Quality of Life for their paper describing the quality of life and meaning of illness of women with lung cancer published in the Oncology Nursing Forum.

Because 90% of lung cancers are linked to tobacco use and thus largely preventable, Dr. Sarna has expanded her research interests to tobacco control. She conducted an Oncology Nursing Society Foundation funded survey to examine the role of the oncology nurses in smoking cessation interventions, the first study to describe the role of oncology professionals in tobacco control. Her results, published in Cancer and the Oncology Nursing Forum, indicated that while nurses were asking patients about their tobacco use, they were not providing information or assistance with smoking cessation, and that one of the barriers was continued smoking among nurses. Each study Dr. Sarna has been involved with has generated new ideas for further research and projects,. Dr. Sarna explains the evolution of the idea for Tobacco Free Nurses, funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation was based upon this survey of oncology nurses. The project includes a website, http://www.tobaccofreenurses.org/ with a link to an internet provider of smoking cessation services, Nurses Quitnet^®, and tobacco control links to resources for all nurses to use to assist their patients with quitting. The web site received a media award from the American Academy of Nurses. She and her team are now examining the efficacy of this smoking cessation program. Recently, she received a grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to conduct a secondary analysis of data from the Harvard Nurses' Health Study to describe changes in tobacco use among nurses over the past 30 years.

As a result of her many publications, especially in lung cancer and tobacco control, Dr. Sarna received the Oncology Nursing Forum Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Oncology Nursing Literature. Dr. Sarna has been an ONS member from the early days of ONS, and served as the original liaison from the American Nurses' Association. She successfully completed the first OCN^® certification exam, and recertified as an OCN^® for many years until the AOCN^® became available, and has maintained that certification.

Dr. Sarna offers some advice to aspiring researchers. Work as a team! For novice researchers, this is particularly important, but she models the important skill of team building in all of her research projects. She notes that the team is helpful in many ways. Obtaining both an adequate sample size and diversity, which are important issues, is facilitated by team members in various settings. If she could begin her career again, she would like to have started earlier so that she would have had more time to develop her research. She advises new researchers to focus on an area "they love". Publication of research results is of utmost importance—she advises that ". . . .if you don't publish it, it didn't happen." She feels strongly about this and considers it an ethical obligation the researcher has to the patients who participated in research to disseminate the knowledge gained. In terms of the biggest challenges in research, she identifies IRB approvals as some of the most difficult and challenging aspects. This is particularly true with multisite research due to the differences in each institution's IRB process.

Dr. Sarna's work has become internationally recognized, and has facilitated tobacco control efforts in other countries. She has assessed tobacco control content in Schools of Nursing in Asia where rates of smoking are still high. Efforts for both nursing students and the general population of these countries are very important in influencing prevention of lung cancer and other tobacco-related disease. Smoking cessation is also an important issue for cancer survivors, including those with lung cancer, as she has noted in her studies. There is a crucial need for continued research to provide support for people with lung cancer, including efforts to promote smoking cessation. Dr. Sarna feels that her work, and that of others, has helped to put tobacco control higher on the priority list for funding, policy change and legislation. She has edited a current supplement of Nursing Research on nursing research and tobacco dependence with describes research recommendations from a national conference. Her research is truly exemplary in illustrating the process of building a research trajectory—her work with people with lung cancer, the focus on survivor issues and quality of life for people with lung cancer, and involvement of nurses in smoking cessation. It is an elegant trajectory, and one which was built, study by study, on hard work and determination to address the needs of an understudied population, people with lung cancer, and commitment to oncology nursing.