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

“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 Chair in Oncology Nursing at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing in Pennsylvania told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS^®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a conversation about the effects of the environment on cancer care and outcomes.

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 April 10, 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: Nurses caring for people with cancer require knowledge to recognize and address how environmental factors influence cancer care delivery, patient outcomes, and workforce resilience.

Episode Notes 

• Complete this evaluation for free NCPD.
• ONS Podcast™ episodes:
• Episode 190: The Environment, Cancer, and Nurses’ Role in Advocating for Climate Change
• Episode 107: Social Determinants Lead to Unequal Access to Health Care
• ONS Voice articles:
• Most Oncology Nurses Want to Address Climate Change but Don’t Know How to Start
• Here’s How the Environment Affects Cancer Care—and What Oncology Nurses Can Do About It
• Climate Change Is Contributing to the Cancer Burden, and Nurses Must Take Action
• Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing articles:
• Oncology Nurses’ Awareness, Concern, Motivations, and Behaviors Related to Climate Change and Health
• Environmental Risk Factors: The Role of Oncology Nurses in Assessing and Reducing the Risk for Exposure
• Oncology Nursing Forum articles:
• Research Priorities of the Oncology Nursing Society: 2024–2027
• The Impact of Climate Change Across the Cancer Control Continuum: Key Considerations for Oncology Nurses (ONS white paper)
• ONS Huddle Card: Environmental Health and Climate Change
• ONS Congress^® session: The Impact of Climate Change on Patient Care
• Supportive Care in Cancer article: Climate Disasters and Oncology Care: A Systematic Review of Effects on Patients, Healthcare Professionals, and Health Systems
• What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
• The Cancer–Climate Connection: Environmental Drivers of Cancer in the Climate Era (webinar by AnnMarie L. Walton)

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 [e-mail].

Highlights From This Episode

“The process of establishing these research priorities usually happens every three or so years. And there’s a lot of preliminary work of talking to multiple parties of interest regarding what they believe the research priorities are, what nurses are seeing in clinics and in the community, and really multiple opinions regarding where the direction of research for ONS should go. And we heard this time—loud and clear—from researchers, from nurses in clinics and in communities, from scholars, and multiple other interested parties, that the environment in a very broad context was very much a concern and specifically a concern for impact on cancer care delivery, quality, and outcomes.” TS 1:49

“You can take some cancer outcome data and you can take patient data related to home address or zip code or even larger geographic areas and kind of do correlational studies to see ‘Does one impact the other?’ … There’s been a lot of those in the literature. But they are very helpful because they’re starting to define this idea that beyond the idea of just demographics—gender, age, race—that the whole concept of neighborhood and the influences of the neighborhood do impact cancer outcomes. And that’s where we’re seeing the sort of explosion in literature across multiple malignancies, stages of cancer, and across multiple questions—specific kinds of outcomes, everything from quality of life to tumor progression.” TS 8:43

“There is growing literature around how cancer delivery can be better prepared for climate-related disasters. … There’s a good article by Pamela Ginex that was published in Supportive Care in Cancer talking about climate disasters and oncology care. And that was really a systematic review looking at published literature and starting to classify where are the disruptions and how could we think about that from a research perspective. They ended up saying there are these patient-level outcome disruptions that of course include treatment disruption but also include this inability to communicate with the oncology care team, which is quite distressing. And there’s a workforce disruption because there are very distressed clinicians who are experiencing the same climate-related disaster in their own lives and feeling like they are torn between their commitment to work and their commitment to family.” TS 13:25

“After all these years in oncology nursing, I am convinced that we have to get the consideration of neighborhood. I think we do have to get back to the neighborhood level in order to boost the resilience of communities against cancer throughout the cancer trajectory.” TS 31:53

“Let’s take some of this to the community and boost the community in that way. I really feel like we have to think about just boots on the ground outside of the cancer center, instead of just documenting disparities or even doing interventional work, but still within our little ivory towers.” TS 34:21

“You see the work of many in looking at the specific environmental risks to nurses through the toxic chemicals to which were exposed. But then thinking about the people who aren’t as protected as nurses and the environmental workers, who are usually contracted out or not in unions, who don’t have some of the same protections that nurses or other healthcare workers might have, and they are exposed to the chemicals without proper training or sometimes without protection. All of these things are very much worthy of an oncology nursing voice elevating these questions and saying, ‘How can we study this? How can we best mitigate some of these risks?’ Oncology nursing—we have to use our respect and good name in elevating all of these questions.” TS 35:39