Onc Nurse On Call: Immunotherapy With Kristin Daly

Welcome to Onc Nurse On Call!

Are you looking for practical insights for maximizing your impact while staying on the cutting edge of cancer care? You’ve found the right place. Onc Nurse On Call is Oncology Nursing News’s new podcast, hosted by editors-in-chief Patricia Jakel, MN, RN, AOCN, and Stephanie Desrosiers (formerly Jackson), DNP, MSN, RN, AOCNS, BMTCN, delivering maximum impact in minimum time.

This week, Kristin Daly, MSN, ANP-BC, AOCNP, a nurse practitioner in medical oncology at WashU Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, spoke with Oncology Nursing News about cancer care in the age of immunotherapy. As a nurse practitioner with more than 20 years of experience in oncology, Daly discusses all things immunotherapy, from pan-cancer therapy to biomarker-driven treatments, highlighting strategies for educating patients on how immunotherapy works.

Daly, who treats patients with head and neck cancers, touches on common types of immunotherapies and how to handle adverse effects in the outpatient setting, including premedication and steroids. She shares helpful analogies for patient education as well as what she calls the “head tilt test,” which she uses to encourage patients to contact the clinic if a new symptom catches a patient’s attention.

The complexity of immunotherapy can, in turn, complicate symptom management.

“When you have more than 1 kind of immunotherapy, it’s not like ‘2 plus 2’ in terms of adverse effects. …It’s more of a multiplicative instead of an additive,” said Daly. “It’s something you really need to watch out for and be very vigilant about: immunotherapy-related adverse effects in those patients and in combination with chemotherapy, and then sometimes also in combination with targeted therapies as well.”

Treating patients in an academic center, care planning for patients in rural communities is something Daly faces as patients are referred in from distances as great as 5-hour drives. Some key considerations for caring for these patients, Daly highlighted, are helping the patient establish a relationship with a primary care provider, finding out if patients have transportation issues, and connecting patients with appropriate resources.

Tune in to Onc Nurse On Call every other week for more insights in all things oncology nursing.