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Evidence-based practice (EBP) is foundational to nursing and can improve patient outcomes. It uses a process of shared decision-making that incorporates the best available evidence, clinical expertise, and patient preferences and values. Nurses and other healthcare providers at the point of care are in an ideal position to ask and answer clinically relevant questions to promote quality, safety, and best-possible outcomes.
When withdrawing from a clinical trial, patients experience a spectrum of emotions ranging from regret, urgency, frustration—and trust in their healthcare professionals, like oncology nurses, according to the results of a study published in JAMA Network Open.
The clinical trials that lead to new drug approvals or expanded indications are quick to praise a therapy’s clinical benefits, such as longer survival or time to progression, but only about one in five of those trials find improvements in patients’ quality of life, researchers reported in JAMA Oncology.
Clinical trials are led by a principal investigator (PI) with a research team that may include physicians, nurses, social workers, and other healthcare professionals. PIs can represent a variety of disciplines, and nurse scientists often hold that role.
Janice is an oncology nurse in a rural community cancer center. Only one of the three oncologists in the practice discusses clinical trials with their patients and typically not until after patients complete two to three lines of therapy. Also, the practice does not have a process for when to order next generation sequencing (NGS). Janice feels it is not ethical that the patients coming to the clinic do not have equal access to those important services.
Many of today’s new drug approvals and standard-of-care treatments have a companion diagnostic test that identifies biomarkers in a patient’s tumor tissue or blood to determine whether they are an appropriate candidate for the therapy. When those results show that they’re not a good match for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved treatment, the findings may identify a biomarker-directed clinical trial as an alternative option. Here’s how oncology nurses can help patients understand which clinical trials listed on their test results might be an option for them.
Healthcare providers are less likely to talk to Black patients with metastatic breast cancer about opportunities to enroll in clinical trials than they are with patients from other racial or ethnic backgrounds, researchers reported at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting.