Cancer Hospital Creates Ambulatory Oncology Fellowship Program for New Graduate Nurses

Christina Matousek, MSN, RN, OCN, of the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale New Haven Health, speaks about a poster she presented at the 49th Annual Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) Congress. The poster outlined the creation, development, and impact of starting an ambulatory oncology fellowship program for new graduate nurses. The program was funded by a grant that the organization received from the Frederick A DeLuca Foundation.
“I was really inspired to help create this type of program to allow new graduate nurses to enter ambulatory oncology right out of nursing school,” she said.
The program’s creation began with Ms. Matousek conducting a literature review to learn about other centers across the nation that had implemented similar programs. This research led her to connect with the organizers of those programs, where she “found a lot of support with building this type of program,” she explained.
“I worked a lot with various cancer centers across the country…. Duke Cancer Center-special shout out to them. Carla and Cindy were amazing with this. They had also implemented this type of program at their institution,” she said. “I really had a lot of support from various individuals throughout the country to get started with this.”
Ms. Matousek explained that she learned “best practices of what was successful at their institutions” and “sought to emulate a lot of what I learned from them as well as catering it towards our institution.”
The ambulatory oncology fellowship program for new graduate nurses at the Smilow Cancer Hospital is a 9-month program that begins with 6 months of rotations through different areas of ambulatory oncology.
“I built their orientation specifically to really emulate the experience that the oncology patient goes through while they're getting cancer care,” Ms. Matousek said. “They have not only specific preceptors to the different areas where they're learning, but they also have relevant shadow experiences built into their experience and orientation.”
The nurses in the fellowship program complete multiple relevant courses in the first several months of the program, including the ONS Fundamentals of Chemotherapy and Immunotherapy Administration™ course and the Smilow Cancer Hospital’s chemotherapy skills course. This education is to “ensure that they're competent at least to begin giving chemotherapy throughout the fellowship program,” Ms. Matousek said.
She explained that the new graduate nurses in the fellowship program receive regular check-ins and support.
“We meet with them once a week to ensure that they have the support that they need and to really look at their competency level as well as confidence level,” Ms. Matousek said. “We do survey them every 3 months to gauge where their knowledge levels are on certain avenues of oncology care.”
The program organizers used multiple methods to gain an understanding of what fellowship program participants are experiencing and learning throughout the process.
“We spend some time actually ensuring that they are feeling better as they progress through the program and we really have seen across the board in every aspect that we survey,” Ms. Matousek said. “We've seen 100% improvement in all the different areas, according to their self-assessment. But noticing, observing them on the unit, it's very evident that they feel more comfortable as time goes on.”
The program’s first cohort, a class of 6, has graduated, and the program helped to facilitate an appropriate open position within the Smilow Cancer Hospital for the graduates.
“They are currently off orientation and in their respective units,” Ms. Matousek said. “We did do a little celebration ceremony for them as well, which was really nice to see how their families come and just to be able to recognize all their hard work.”