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Episode 399: National Hazardous Drug Exposure Registry

Release Date: 01/23/2026

Episode 413: Intrarenal Administration for Upper Urothelial Tract Disease: The Oncology Nurse’s Role

The ONS Podcast

“We thought, from a nursing standpoint, ‘What is our goal for doing this?’ What we wanted was first, education of the patient. Can we successfully educate the patient to prepare them? Can we alleviate as much anxiety as possible so that they feel comfortable coming in and having this done? The second goal is to preserve kidney function throughout the treatment. To date, we’ve been successful with that. And the third goal is to complete treatment without infection,” ONS member Chris Amoroso, BSN, RN, OCN®, registered nurse at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, PA, told Jaime...

Episode 412: Pharmacology 101: Cytokines

The ONS Podcast

“They are small, powerful little nuggets. They are actually small signaling proteins that our immune cells use to communicate. They really help regulate immune activation or inflammation and even the growth and survival of immune cells. When cytokines are used therapeutically in oncology, they help to stimulate immune cells such as T cells or natural killer cells to better recognize and attack cancer cells,” Maribel Pereiras, PharmD, BCPS, BCOP, clinical pharmacy specialist at the John Theurer Cancer Center of Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, told Jaime Weimer, MSN,...

Episode 411: An Overview of Myelodysplastic Syndrome for Oncology Nurses

The ONS Podcast

“Not every patient with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) is going to progress and die. Only 10%–20% of them will evolve into acute myeloid leukemia. And not all of them need blood transfusions. Some present with low platelet count. It’s not just people who are anemic that have MDS—it’s different depending on what type of MDS they have. These are averages. We’re giving you statistics based on averages, and you’re an individual, so we want to treat you as an individual,” ONS member Sara Tinsley-Vance, PhD, APRN, AOCN®, nurse practitioner and quality-of-life researcher at Moffitt...

Episode 410: The Evidence for the Environment’s Impact on Cancer Outcomes

The ONS Podcast

“Cancer and environmental disasters in particular, but the worsening of our environment, are really things that are great equalizers. And we recognize that we’re all kind of in this world together. We can really face these issues on a more human level. I think always recognizing that if we look at something, we think, ‘Well, that doesn’t relate to me or that problem is it really isn’t my problem’—it sure is,” ONS member Margaret “Peggy” Rosenzweig, PhD, CRNP-C, AOCNP®, FAAN, ONS scholar-in-residence and distinguished service professor of nursing and Nancy Glunt Hoffman...

Episode 409: An Overview of Interventional Oncology for Nurses

The ONS Podcast

“Interventional oncology has really evolved into an important component of modern cancer care and is often described now as the fourth pillar alongside medical, surgical, and radiation oncology. The specialty now encompasses a broad spectrum of image-guided procedures that support from cancer diagnosis, treatment, to effectively managing symptoms that are caused by the disease. In other words, what we’re seeing is that across the continuum of care, IO is playing a vital role,” ONS member Evelyn P. Wempe, DNP, MBA, APRN, ACNP-BC, AOCNP®, CRN, NEA-BC, executive director for advanced...

Episode 408: Radiation Site-Specific Side Effects: Breast Cancer

The ONS Podcast

“A side effect patients might experience is lymphedema. This is an increased buildup of lymphatic fluid in the tissues, either in the breast or in the arm and hand of the affected side. It’s quite problematic for women. They might feel self-conscious. It might feel uncomfortable that the arm feels like it’s throbbing or heavy. Clothing may not fit quite right. So we’re always on the lookout for lymphedema,” Maria Fenton-Kerimian, APRN, AOCNP®, nurse practitioner at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS®, manager of oncology nursing practice...

Episode 407: Pharmacology 101: CAR T-Cell Immunotherapy

The ONS Podcast

“You want to try to act quickly and be able to know what the pathways are for appropriate escalating when a patient is having symptoms that are reflective of cytokine release syndrome (CRS) or neurotoxicity. These toxicities are very manageable and treatable when recognized early. To summarize, choosing the right patient, knowing the toxicity profile for each product, and acting early is really what helps to prevent severe outcomes with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy,” Maribel Pereiras, PharmD, BCPS, BCOP, clinical pharmacy specialist at the John Theurer Cancer Center at...

Episode 406: Drug Resistance Biomarkers and Their Impact on Cancer Treatment Choices

The ONS Podcast

“Our goal of precision oncology has been to shift to tailored therapies that can help to improve treatment efficacy and ultimately improve patient outcomes. Resistance biomarker testing can help the care team to detect these genomic changes that the tumor may have acquired during therapy that makes the cells resistant to therapy. This information can be extremely helpful when we’re talking about making choices about second-line or subsequent-line therapy,” ONS member Danielle Fournier, DNP, APRN, AGPCNP-BC, AOCNP®, advanced practice RN at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer...

Episode 405: Long-Term Multiple Myeloma Considerations for Oncology Nurses

The ONS Podcast

“The disease is increasingly managed as a chronic condition rather than a diagnosis with an immediate terminal outcome. Particularly, with earlier and more effective and sustained treatment options, we can make this disease a very chronic, long-term, livable condition. I want to make sure that patients are aware that this is not a death sentence. This is something that patients can live with for the long term,” Ann McNeill, RN, MSN, APN, nurse practitioner at the John Theurer Cancer Center at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, NJ, told Lenise Taylor, MN, RN, AOCNS®,...

Episode 404: Tailor Patient Treatment Education for Non-Oncology Indications

The ONS Podcast

“We print education sheets that we have, and we say, ‘Just ignore this part that says cancer. You’re getting this med but for a different indication.’ And then you have to really point out what our goals of care are. You’re using the information that, as oncology nurses, we like and love, but we’re having to cross it out and say, ‘Just read this portion and just do this here.’ And that can be challenging for the nurse and probably confusing for the patient,” ONS member Brandy Thornberry, RN, OCN®, outpatient infusion and VAD supervisor at Logan Health in Kalispell, MT,...

More Episodes

“The United States does not have a national cancer registry. We have a bunch of state registries. Some of those registries do collaborate and share information, but the issue is the registries that do exist typically do not report cancer by occupation. So, we cannot get our arms around the potential work-relatedness of the health outcome given the current way the state registries collect information. What we’re trying to set up, is a way to make what is currently an invisible risk, visible,” ONS member Melissa McDiarmid, MD, MPH, DABT, professor of medicine and epidemiology and public health director of the division of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS^®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a conversation about the University of Maryland School of Medicine Hazardous Drug Safety Center Exposure Registry.

Music Credit: “Fireflies and Stardust” by Kevin MacLeod

Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0

Earn 0.75 contact hours of nursing continuing professional development (NCPD) by listening to the full recording and completing an evaluation at courses.ons.org by January 23, 2027. The planners and faculty for this episode have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose. ONS is accredited as a provider of nursing continuing professional development by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.

Learning outcome: Learners will report an increase in knowledge in the incidence of hazardous drug exposure and the tracking and reporting of healthcare worker exposures.

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 pubONSVoice@ons.org.

Highlights From This Episode

“We thought that in order to answer some of the unclear questions about health risk, we would set up an exposure registry, in this case, for oncology personnel who handle the drugs. This would then create a cohort that we could ask questions to. For example, we could try to characterize whether there is a cancer excess in this group. Or characterize the reproductive abnormalities in excess that people are experiencing.” TS 6:21

“It’s sort of counterintuitive that the healthcare industry, whose mission itself is care of the sick, is a high-hazard industry. We typically think about the risk as being from infectious diseases, and certainly we’ve all lived in our practice lifetime through some examples of that. Even before COVID-19, some of us were doing preparation for Ebola and that sort of thing. So, we’re kind of used to that. But the hazards that you kind of grew up with, we’ve routinized or normalized handling group one, human carcinogens, which a number of these drugs are—it’s just something we do every day. Well, it is, but we have to do it with respect and with care every day. And I think sometimes in that routineness of it, we have sort of lost sight of the vigilance that we need to maintain.” TS 11:19

“It’s very easy in the life cycle of a drug in an organization to do something that doesn’t just impact you, but unknowingly, you’ve contaminated a surface for somebody who comes behind you. Who maybe doesn’t have plastic protective equipment on because something that got contaminated shouldn’t have been contaminated in the first place. If we could all be thinking of it as more of a team sport, especially in terms of safe handling, that our disposition and drug handling affects not just us and our health, but those of our colleagues.” TS 24:47

“For the job history pieces, we ask what year you started, what year you stopped, and we ask about estimations of handling. So we’ll be able to come up with either a duration or some kind of metric for the intensity and duration of your handling history, which will then permit us to sort the population who completed the survey into sort of low, medium, high. And we’ll see whether the health outcomes that are being reported are influenced by that drug handling history.” TS 27:45

“The idea that we aren’t exposed to the same therapeutic dose we give to our patients is absolutely true. However, the dosing schedule to them versus us is very different, and we are exposed frequently, if not daily, to very small concentrations. They don’t reach a cytotoxic dose necessarily, but we do know from a lot of studies that either ourselves or our colleagues are taking up drug from contaminated work environments. And you’ve probably seen there is an awful lot of intermediate evidence looking at genotoxic insult in pharmacists and nurses who handle the drugs. So clearly we’re showing uptake and we're showing that there are biologically plausible, concerning measures that are taking place in us. So, I think that we need to come back and circle around the idea that we need to have deep respect for the toxicity of these agents.” TS 35:03

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