Patients Rely on Nurses for Crucial Immunotherapy Information

Nurses need to have a breadth of knowledge when it comes to immunotherapy, especially as it continues to become more widespread, said Grace Cherry, NP, MSN, RN, a nurse practitioner at the UCLA Melanoma Program.

TRANSCRIPTION

There's a lot of new changes that are going on. Immunotherapy is not just a treatment for melanoma anymore, it's a treatment for many other cancers. Nurses are frontline. They're the ones that give the medication, and our patients are looking to us to explain to them 'how does the drug work' and 'what can I expect?' So I think being up-to-date and being able to explain how they work and having a general knowledge of why we're doing clinical trials would really help us in our role of explaining that to the patients.