For you as a nurse in oncology, there are numerous opportunities for further education and training. Nurses in this field are currently in high demand and the trend is rising: oncology is the area of internal medicine that deals with the prevention, diagnosis, conservative treatment and aftercare of malignant diseases. At the UMM, we have many opportunities to diagnose malignant tumors and diseases at an early stage, classify the type of disease, treat them specifically and thus limit or prevent their spread in many cases. Ideally, a complete cure is achieved.
In any case, the diagnosis of "cancer" is a serious and anxiety-ridden situation for those affected, which must be overcome. Our patients receive support from a therapeutic team of different professional groups at the UMM, especially the nursing staff. Oncology care is becoming increasingly complex. We are seeing more elderly and very elderly multimorbid patients and more patients with cancer as a chronic disease, which means that there is an increased need for counseling and continuous support for patients and relatives, side effect management, as well as an increase in documentation and the assumption of delegated medical tasks and much more.
In addition, we have a nationwide shortage of young nursing staff. We would like to answer the question "How can we get nurses interested in further specialist training?" as follows: There has been very good experience with further specialist training, but it can also be seen as a milestone on the road to "lifelong learning" and prepare the next step towards academization. "Academization means enabling nurses to use evidence-based knowledge and put it into practice, to read scientific studies and to be able to implement their results and guidelines, to research expert standards, to check them and to adapt them to their own setting, whether inpatient or outpatient, and to do so in a well-founded manner. It's about carrying out complex nursing interventions and care planning, for example for multimorbid patients." Says Prof. Dr. Karen Pottkämper, course coordinator for "Advanced Clinical Nursing" at the Akkon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, adding "It's about professional problem perception, both at the bedside and in the structures, and about competence in independent problem solving and developing your own standards according to scientific methods. Medicine is like that, why shouldn't nursing be like that too?".
On the other hand, we must also work to offer those trained in this way the appropriate framework conditions for practical application; only then can we achieve the desired goal of 20% academicized nursing and keep satisfied and healthy employees at the site and in the profession.
Our declared aim in oncology nursing is to maintain and improve our patients' quality of life and alleviate their symptoms. In doing so, we attach great importance to promoting and maintaining their independence and to involving their relatives and caregivers. However, we will not be able to provide patient care in a changing system in the future without academically trained nurses. Studies - at least abroad - show the positive effects of academization. Here we see that the higher the number of academically trained nurses, the better the care - with shorter lengths of stay, reduced mortality and better outcomes.
Yvonne Dintelmann
