Champions of progress

This past week I read an interesting report on how human oncology nurses in a large public hospital established a new guideline-based antiemetic therapy. They did it by noticing that their chemotherapy patients were not getting efective antiemetic treatment and they used current guidelines coupled with their own observations to determine how treatment could be improved. What is interesting about this report is that it was the nursing observations that determined that the treatments were not always efective and it was the nurses themselves who took responsibility for addressing the problem by establishing their own objective measurements and collecting data about which patients were most at risk for not receiving efective treatment. While it is not the nurses who ultimately make decisions for what medication to prescribe, in this case, it was the nurse's evidence that assisted doctors to make better decisions about which treatments to implement. This collaboration of the medical team produced a much better outcome for the patients.