Bringing together more than 3,000 oncology nurses and other cancer care providers, the Oncology Nursing Society hosts its 48th Annual ONS Congress in San Antonio, TX, from April 26–30, 2023. As the largest, most comprehensive oncology nursing conference in the United States, the annual event offers educational sessions, networking opportunities, and groundbreaking nursing research reports.
The National Institutes of Health, through its All of Us Research Program, announced in January 2023 research funding opportunities to expand the use of the program’s data to advance precision medicine. NIH allocated up to $4.75 million in fiscal year 2023 for the research grants.
The complexity of cancer care may affect patients’ financial toxicity more than we’ve realized. Many patients struggle with the economic burden of out-of-pocket spending for cancer care, including insurance copayments, transportation, and reduced income, as well as their psychological burden of worry and coping with less funds for food and medications.
Continuing the fight toward health equity, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Office of Minority Health released a report in November 2022 on current progress and future actions to improve health equity data collection.
Anger is a common emotion for both patients and their partners when facing cancer, but in almost a quarter of relationships, that anger turns psychologically or physically violent. According to the results of a new study published in Supportive Care in Cancer, both genders report acts of abuse from their partners during the cancer journey.
On February 2, 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reported Smiths Medical’s recall of its CADD™ infusion system administration sets and cassette reservoirs because of tubing occlusions that may under- or not deliver medication and false no disposable attached alarms that may prevent pump use. FDA identified it as a class I recall, the most serious type of recall, where use may cause serious injuries or death.
As a clinician in inpatient cardiovascular and acute care nursing and as a healthcare administrator, like many of my colleagues across the nation, I have encountered many violent situations in the workplace. Healthcare workers account for 73% of all violence-related nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses, and nurses bear the brunt of that statistic, with 44% reporting physical violence and 68% reporting verbal. In fact, in 2022, more than two nurses were assaulted every hour. The rate of violence-related injuries is higher in health care than in all other occupational settings.
From the workforce to the populations that the discoveries support, America’s science and technology ecosystem is in dire need of diversity and equity, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said. In December 2022, it launched an action plan to create avenues in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine for previously excluded communities.
Across all nursing specialties and settings, 60% of nurses reported experiencing an incident of workplace bullying and incivility and 29% confronted at least one incident of violence in 2022, according to the American Nurses Foundation 2022 Workplace Survey report. And it’s escalating—violence against hospital employees and healthcare professionals has increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, with 44% of nurses reporting having experienced physical violence and 67% verbal abuse between February and June 2020 alone.
To try to get ahead of a feared increase of COVID-19 cases over the winter, the Biden-Harris administration released a COVID-19 winter preparedness plan in December 2022 that focuses on making vaccinations, testing, and other resources easily accessible.