Genetic Competent Care in Cancer: The Nurse's Role and Implications

This discussion board post delves into the critical role of genetic competent care in managing cancer, emphasizing the nurse's responsibilities in ensuring quality, safe, and ethical patient care. It highlights that cancer is fundamentally a genetic disease, necessitating nurses to be integral in policy-making and healthcare practices related to genomics and genetics. The discussion outlines the nurse's role in assessing patient status, providing education, coordinating complex treatments, and managing symptoms, particularly during chemotherapy. Furthermore, it addresses the implications of integrating genomic knowledge into nursing education to address health service inequities and improve patient outcomes. The post also references scholarly articles to support the discussion on how genetics and genomics relate to nursing practice in cancer care. Desklib offers more resources and solved assignments for students.

Running head: GENETIC COMPETENT CARE 1
Genetic Competent Care for Cancer
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GENETIC COMPETENT CARE 2
Summary
Cancer is a genetic disease. Quality, safety and ethical nursing care is crucial practice of
health improvement and maintenance for a cancer patient. Nurses are the integral in policy
making strategies that affects the healthcare practice in the field of genomics and genetics. The
healthcare professional representatives of nursing organizations and nurses are the foundation of
behavioral perspectives that emphasizes on health promotion and prevention in the environment
of the family, patient and the community. Nurses and other healthcare professional are
responsible for fostering the healthcare infrastructure to ensure quality oversight of genomic and
genetic laboratory tests. The policies related to genetic illnesses like chronic cancer require
important components in nursing education to deliver healthcare regardless of setting, to
accelerate work of application and translation of genomic advances that protect and promote
health of the patients. The knowledge in nursing practice about the genomic information is
relevance to the genetic clinical care. The knowledge of nurses about the genomics/genetics and
the skills obtained and assessed through the risk in a family history are sufficient to assist people
to avert the adult assault disorders, mortality and morbidity consequences (Huston, 2013).
Roles of the nurses
The nurse is required to be an expert in assessing the patient’s emotional and physical
status, health practices, past history and both the family’s and patient’s knowledge about the
treatment of the disease. The oncology nurse always has a better chance to form the necessary
rapport for efficient education to the patient and the family members than any other healthcare
team. The education to the patient and the family begins prior to therapy and proceeds during
and after the therapy. The nurse plays an important role in complex and coordination of multiple

GENETIC COMPETENT CARE 3
technologies frequently employed in cancer treatment and diagnosis (McLennan, Uhrich, Lasiter,
Chamness & Helft, 2013).
The coordination involves direct client’s care, symptom management, medical records
documentation, participating in therapy, education for both family and the patient, diagnosis and
therapy counseling, referral arrangement for other healthcare providers and fluent follow up. The
oncology nurse is responsible for direct patient care especially during chemotherapy. The main
role of the nurse during chemotherapy is to ensure the correct medication and dosage are
administered through the correct route and to the right patient. It is the role of the oncology nurse
to assist and triage in evaluation of the disease symptoms and initiation of nursing interventions.
The oncology nurse is the one who is closely involved with several supportive care issues that
the cancer patient and the family encounters such as survivorship and pain management (Lewis,
Bucher, Heitkemper, Harding, Kwong & Roberts, 2016).
Implications
There is a need for more efforts to prepare nurses for the contemporary genomic era so as
to transform healthcare through educating the nurses to be adequately skilled in the new
knowledge. Increment of more resources is necessary to support and prepare the faculties in the
ongoing changes needed to ensure implementation and sustainable integration of genomic
content in all the nursing programs. With regard to the genetic for nursing practice, the nursing
as a professional play a role in assuring that genomic healthcare is not tolerating ethnic and racial
health service inequities. It is because ethnicity and racism are nowadays potential attributes for
the population protected from or at the risk of the chronic disease and for the different treatment
responses (Vaismoradi, Turunen & Bondas, 2013).

GENETIC COMPETENT CARE 4
Reference
Huston, C. (2013). The impact of emerging technology on nursing care: warp speed ahead. The
Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 18(2).
Lewis, S. L., Bucher, L., Heitkemper, M. M., Harding, M. M., Kwong, J., & Roberts, D. (2016).
Medical-Surgical Nursing-E-Book: Assessment and Management of Clinical Problems,
Single Volume. Elsevier Health Sciences.
McLennon, S. M., Uhrich, M., Lasiter, S., Chamness, A. R., & Helft, P. R. (2013). Oncology
nurses’ narratives about ethical dilemmas and prognosis-related communication in
advanced cancer patients. Cancer nursing, 36(2), 114-121.
Vaismoradi, M., Turunen, H., & Bondas, T. (2013). Content analysis and thematic analysis:
Implications for conducting a qualitative descriptive study. Nursing & health sciences,
15(3), 398-405.