More knowledge, more safety
The pace of improvement in oncology nurse specialization and safety is uneven across countries and facilities. “The people who taught us would just Google information. I feel we were not adequately trained,” Moyo recalled, while noting that hospital training in Zimbabwe has improved in the past five years.
“The lack of knowledge is really frightening,” said Rowan Robinson of Netcare from South Africa, one of the largest health care networks in the country, who has delivered training sessions in the region starting with concepts as basic as “What is cancer?”
In South Africa, any nurse can administer hazardous drugs without specific training, but the network now insists that anyone working with chemotherapy must, at a minimum, have an induction course. Netcare are updating policies; writing standard operating procedures to include aspects of safety for the patient, staff, and the environment; and seeking certification of international ISO standards.
Latin American hospitals are also progressing, notably through twinning programs with facilities in higher-income countries. One example is the partnership between the hospitals of St Jude in the U.S. and Dr. Luis Calvo Mackenna in Chile to deliver the Spanish Chemotherapy/Biotherapy course by the Association of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Nurses, or APHON, in the region.
Nurse and education supervisor of the initiative, Paola Viveros, said Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, and El Salvador are some of the countries where she sees safety standards being lifted, for example with regards to PPE, while Peru is in process of achieving all six SIOP Baseline Nursing Standards as a focus country of the WHO Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer.
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