Recipients of ONS Foundation Funding

Dr. Schwartz, like other successful nurse researchers, advises those beginning a research career to find your passion and stick with it with "dogged persistence"! That approach has certainly worked for Dr. Schwartz, a successful nurse scientist, who found that even in her master's program she was committed to using exercise to combat cancer related fatigue. She had a unique twist to her research passion, however, as her personal experience with cancer, combined with a background in Exercise Science, Health Education, preparation as a Family Nurse Practitioner, and a second master's in Community Health Nursing provided a highly individualized background for this research focus.

She became involved in oncology nursing right out of her undergraduate program and worked as a nurse on a bone marrow transplant unit (BMT). She knew she was interested in research and felt that the BMT population would provide a great background for the research trajectory she planned to develop. As a master's student, she developed her first research project around the issues related to exercise in breast cancer patients. In her doctoral work at the University of Utah, she obtained external funding through the ONS Foundation to study exercise, quality of life and fatigue in breast cancer patients. Although she wanted to test an intervention, she had to focus instead on developing a measure of fatigue. Based on this experience for her dissertation, she was well positioned to develop intervention studies, and she emphasized the truth that each study provides a foundation for the next. She finished her PhD in 1997, and building on her doctoral dissertation, was funded through the ONS Foundation receiving funding from the FIRE project, and a larger grant to examine the effect of exercise and Ritalin in melanoma and renal cancer patients receiving biotherapy.

Dr. Schwartz finds research exciting, and identifies the most challenging aspect to be that of preserving the integrity of the intervention. She also suggests that staying on the "cutting edge" in such a dynamic field, as oncology nursing is a challenge. She advises new researchers, besides being doggedly persistent, to find a topic area that they are really interested in and to seek out a good mentor. She feels that she would not change a thing about her own career trajectory and emphasizes the importance of starting on a research path early on. She also acknowledges the valuable mentorship she had at every phase of her research career development. She recommends that the novice researcher be clear about his or her research goals, and be able to articulate them in order to find the mentorship needed to move ahead.

Dr. Schwartz places her research interests right in line with ONS priorities. She has focused her inquiry on symptom management and outcome measurement. She recognizes the value of the interdisciplinary approach to research, and has built interdisciplinary approaches into her studies from the beginning.

In her plans for the future, she urges that further study of the cost-effectiveness of various interventions to improve cancer patient outcomes is needed. Her research is directly relevant to patient care and the "needs at the bedside" as exercise is being recognized for its importance in improving not only treatment outcomes, but also quality of life. She sees the next steps in studying fatigue and the use of exercise as defining standards of care for exercise as an intervention, and standards of practice for incorporating exercise guidelines into the treatment plan. She envisions incorporating personal trainers, an increasingly popular approach to increasing personal fitness, and educating them about the special needs of cancer patients.

The benefits of research such as Dr. Schwartz's to the care of oncology patients has already been realized as her work, along with that of other's in this area, has helped to define the benefits of exercise. Her persistence has paid off and has improved the care of cancer patients suffering from fatigue. Her continued discovery in this research area will help to reduce the symptom burden of fatigue in cancer patients and provides support for the increasing evidence base for clinical practice.