Delivering cancer treatment to patients either in hospital or at home requires health and safety regulation because the drug is classed as toxic to body cells and when exposed to the treatment it can be hazardous to an individual’s health. Treatment can be given through a needle into the patient by using a syringe or attaching a drip. When attaching the treatment, the nurse can be exposed to the toxic drug. This is either through direct contact, inhaling or ingesting the drug. This study is to ask cancer nurses what their experience have been, or their feelings regarding the potential exposure to cytotoxic drugs while delivering cancer treatments on a regular daily basis to numerous patients in their care.
The study hopes to look at other studies that have been published to see if there are any specific questions that the research teams should ask the nurses. Then the research team will design and adapted questions to send to about two hundred nurses across the UK to fill in and return. These questions will cover how and when the nurses use protective equipment to prevent exposure to toxic drugs. It will also ask about their place of work; staffing levels and number of daily patients requiring treatment, what types of treatment and where is this given. This will give the research team an idea what the nursing, potential exposure, practice looks like across the UK, as this will be different by cancer centre and local hospitals. To understand this topic more the research team will ask, about thirty nurses, questions over the telephone to help understand the individual and how they think and feel about giving cancer treatments. When you combine looking at the studies done with looking at the picture across the UK including the voices of the nurses dealing with this on a day-to-day basis we will be able to answer more questions and give advice for practice into the future.