Photo Credit: Doble-d
Physician’s Weekly spoke with Richard Newcomb, MD, on the role of nurses and APs in enhancing palliative care.
Physician’s Weekly (PW): What kind of role could you see oncology nurses or advanced practitioners playing in an education component linked with palliative care?
Richard Newcomb, MD: I think a very key role. I think if you go back to our specialty palliative care studies, the palliative care clinicians were either specialty palliative care physicians or nurse practitioners who are trained in palliative care. And so, these domains, I think it’s critical actually to involve people outside the physician world. So I think bedside nurses could play a huge role in it. And currently in the process of launching a primary palliative care study. And most of the people we’re training are both the inpatient and the outpatient nurse practitioners. We didn’t include nursing in that study, but that could be something that could easily be done. And I could say anecdotally, I think if you were to who’s already doing the best job at delivery, some of the coping and education stuff, it is our bedside inpatient nurses. I think that involving them in future work would be highly concordant with the work that we’re doing.
PW: How do patients with blood cancer who undergo transplant respond to palliative care?
Dr. Newcomb: I think the one additional thing that I thought was quite interesting was that just how different people’s responses to palliative care were. I think when you look at averages in terms of who is doing palliative care in the hospital, everybody’s quality of life on an average basis goes down during transplant just because it’s a hard process. But, receiving palliative care was mostly trying to prevent a very large decrement in quality of life or a very large increase in symptoms. And what was interesting is that there were people in the responder group that their quality of life got better throughout the transplant hospitalization. So, it’s not simply that we were preventing decrement, but we were actually improving people’s quality of life, which was not a finding that I expected. And again, it just speaks to the power of if you can control people’s symptoms enough and give them enough education and power to know what to expect in their illness, then they will report a better experience. And that’s really important—that was really surprising.
