I am interested in knowing who administers inpatient chemotherapy at your hospitals, particularly smaller hospitals<150 beds. Our inpatient nurses claim they can not maintain competency for administration of chemotherapy regardless of what education they receive. There are discussions regarding the IV nurses or Oupatient Infusion Center nurses accepting responsibility for this and we are trying to get input on what others are doing. Thanks for any input.
Lynn Hadaway, M.Ed., RN, NPD-BC, CRNI
Lynn Hadaway Associates, Inc.
PO Box 10
Milner, GA 30257
Website http://www.hadawayassociates.com
Office Phone 770-358-7861
We are a small community hospital (320 beds) and my IV Team used to administer all the IVP chemotherapy while the floor RN's who had taken a chemotherapy class, had a didactic and return demo gave the continuous infusions. It also became hard for the whole team to maintain competency. Now we have traine a few floor RN's as above (with representatives on each shift) and they give the IV push drugs. We limited the number of floor staff trained, for the same reasons you question - any more and they would not have been able to maintain their competency. This has worked quite well. However, we are working with a consulting company on competency and they state chemo is just a med, and all nurses shold be competent in medication administration. The competency comes from the difference in sending and accepting the medication from the pharmacy, from calculating the BSA and disposing of hazardous waste.
null