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Episode 353: ONS 50th Anniversary: Evolution of Oncology Nursing Certification

The ONS Podcast

Release Date: 03/07/2025

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“The response was, in my opinion, sort of overwhelmingly positive. I think all of us old-timers who were at ONS Congress® in 1986 remember those 1,600 nurses waiting in line to enter the ballroom to take that inaugural exam. It takes a while to check in 1,600 people. They kind of all filled up the lobby outside of the ballroom, and then they spilled over down into the escalator, and the escalators had to be turned off,” Cyndi Miller-Murphy, MSN, FAAN, CAE, first executive director of the Oncology Nursing Certification Corporation (ONCC), told Clara Beaver, DNP, RN, AOCNS®, ACNS-BC, ONS member and member of the ONS 50th anniversary committee, during a conversation about the evolution of oncology nursing certification. Beaver spoke with Tony Ellis, MSEd, CAE, ICE-CCP, executive director of ONCC, and Miller-Murphy about the history, current landscape, and future of certification in oncology nursing.

Music Credit: “Fireflies and Stardust” by Kevin MacLeod

Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0 

Episode Notes 

To discuss the information in this episode with other oncology nurses, visit the ONS Communities.

To find resources for creating an ONS Podcast Club in your chapter or nursing community, visit the ONS Podcast Library.

To provide feedback or otherwise reach ONS about the podcast, email [email protected].

Highlights From This Episode

Miller-Murphy: “Oncology nursing is a highly specialized area with a broad, well-defined body of knowledge, and it’s essential for employees and healthcare consumers to be able to identify nurses who have demonstrated that they possess the knowledge that’s necessary to practice competently in the specialty. Nurses who become certified take that essential step to publicly demonstrate their knowledge. And I believe this makes them a known commodity, so to speak.” TS 1:49

Ellis: “Oncology nursing is an area of high-stakes patient care, and a core purpose of certification is to safeguard the public. This is certainly an area of health care that benefits from having that role of professional certification being played, from the knowledge requirements to the practice hours that a nurse must have, to the performance on the exam and continued competence required to maintain the certification. Our certifications hold nurses to a higher standard, which helps protect the public in the care that they provide.” TS 2:45

Miller-Murphy: “A group of, I think, 200 nurses got together at an American Cancer Society conference back in 1980 to discuss the desire for certification in ontology. Nurses wanted a way to verify their specialized knowledge and skills. They wanted to raise the level of professionalism, and ONS was the most appropriate organization to develop the certifications. And by 1983, a survey of members revealed strong interest in specialty certification in oncology.” TS 5:29

Ellis: “The pace of change in oncology care is really the challenge for certification programs proper right now. There’s so many wonderful advances—oncology treatments and drugs that are coming to the market that are being used in non-oncology settings and other advancements in the practice, that keeping up with that change puts pressure on certification programs because they must validate knowledge and practice that has become standard. It has to have been in the practice long enough that whatever the content, whatever the practice is that you’re testing on, that there is one single correct answer. So you can’t necessarily test on the very latest of what has come to the market or to the practice. The other flipside of that is that pace of change, the new emerging things in the practice create opportunities for other kinds of credentials.” TS 24:31

Ellis: “What we have found is that there are thousands and thousands of oncology nurses that are practicing at a level and doing specialized work beyond the scope of the OCN® body of knowledge—so at the master’s level, PhD, especially with the advent of the DNP, and there is work there. And this really came out of our work to update the advanced oncology nurse competencies. … So the new certification is the Advanced Certified Oncology Nurse, or the ACON. In certification, and it is suited for those nurses that are practicing at that higher level.” TS 32:52