Professor Mei Krishnasamy has risen through the ranks of the cancer nursing world to become an internationally recognised key influencer holding major leadership positions within the VCCC Alliance and broader cancer sector, as well as a respected cancer nurse researcher in patient experiences and outcomes research. Now, she wants to see more nurses fulfilling their potential.
Let’s imagine you have a serious wound, or a really complex treatment regimen with a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. You want to know that the nurse caring for you is able to draw on the right mix of research knowledge as well as clinical acumen and expertise, to quickly identify and respond to your symptoms or apply the appropriate dressing for your particular wound.
For us as professionals, it is incredibly important that the care we deliver to people is evidenced-based. Nurse-led research is about generating knowledge and evidence to inform our practice so we know the care we deliver is safe and of benefit.
It’s interesting, the community more broadly doesn’t expect nurses to be driving research, and yet I think most people would want to receive care that has been proven to be safe, and is the right care at the right time for the right person.
In the cancer domain, nurses are the first line of defence. If we don’t have the knowledge and skills to look at someone and go hang on, that’s not right and this is why, then that person is at risk. A doctor may only have time to be in a hospital room with a patient for five minutes in 24 hours. Nurses are there 24/7. The importance of moving away from an expectation of nurses as solely being the doers, not the critical thinkers, is imperative, because the safety of people’s lives is often in nurses’ hands.
Coming in as a senior cancer nurse leader to the VCCC Alliance put me at the table with diverse leaders in the cancer field and enabled me to elevate the visibility of nursing, to show where we add value in a complex system of care.
It has been incredibly rewarding personally, because I have learnt so much from listening to people I otherwise wouldn’t have access to. And at a professional level, it has allowed me to bring a sophisticated conversation about what nursing is and what we do, to people who may not have heard that otherwise.
My greatest delight is the opportunity to have conversations about equity. That for me is what the VCCC Alliance is about – that every patient should have equitable access to the same quality of care no matter who or where they are, regardless of what group of doctors, nurses or allied health staff are looking after them.
We know that more and more of our patients are being cared for regionally and rurally. With that comes a responsibility to ensure that nurses in those communities have the same educational opportunities for knowledge and skills advancement as all nurses have - from a cancer practice point of view and from a research point of view.
We’ve run 12-week intensive research training programs from which we’ve had nurses go on to undertake PHDs, enter clinical trial roles, and develop studies in their own areas. We’ve had incredible attendance at our Nurse-Led Research Hub workshops that have been sold out, with waiting lists. Nurses want to be research enabled, they want to deliver the best care possible, and the VCCC Alliance enables that.
In five years I’d like to see an enhanced cancer nursing workforce tackling inequity at all levels for people, whether that’s because their preferred language isn’t English, they’re First Nations people, they’re disadvantaged by mental health issues or poverty – all those things.
I believe that upskilling nurses to develop and implement research will drive changes in our system of care, making it much more efficient and person-centred; that we will be better enabled to contribute to multidisciplinary conversations and policy discussions, and that we will be equal players in those conversations.
Professor Mei Krishnasamy is Deputy Chair of the VCCC Alliance Cancer Research Advisory Committee, VCCC Alliance Research & Education Lead, Cancer Nursing, and Director, Academic Nursing Unit, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.
