March 2016

My story serves as a reminder that every patient and family I meet as an oncology nurse navigator deserves the care I wanted my father to have.

Carol Bush, BS, RN, is an oncology nurse navigator with the Midwest Cancer Alliance. She has a passion for helping medical teams learn to embrace innovation and thrive in a patient-focused environment.

Diagnosing and treating a patient with a less common cancer can be challenging for practitioners, yet with greater awareness and better diagnostics more of these rare cancers are likely to show up in the clinic.

Educating, raising awareness, and implementing an urgent visit program can reduce emergency department use and number of hospitalizations.

Misdiagnosis of neuroendocrine tumors remains an ongoing challenge, and a recent international study involving more than 100 countries and nearly 2000 patients revealed the average case takes between 5 and 9 years to properly diagnose after the first symptoms appear, and the average patient may see five or six doctors.

Men newly diagnosed with breast cancer need a great deal of support, in part because of how rare breast cancer is in men, and because the typical reaction to a breast cancer diagnosis is one of disbelief.

I had anal cancer, and as a registered nurse with over 20 years of experience under my belt, this was unbelievable.

Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) are “still in their infancy in the cancer world,” according to Rebecca N. Claassen, RN, BSN, OCN.