While you’re busy caring for your patients, ONS is busy caring for you. We know that you rely on ONS to provide evidence-based education to keep you up to date in your practice and help you improve quality of life and outcomes for patients with cancer and their families.
In order to continue to provide you with the best oncology nursing education, we’re constantly evaluating our programs to ensure they continue to meet your needs. In response to your feedback, we recently looked at our two-day chemotherapy training course. You told us that although it’s crucial to your day-to-day work as an oncology nurse, the vast amount of content covered is difficult to absorb over the two-day, 16-hour in-person course.
To better meet your needs, ONS is replacing the two-day, face-to-face chemotherapy course with an interactive, comprehensive, online course that will offer a certificate indicating the learner possesses specific specialty knowledge (from ONCC) and a continuing nursing education certificate and provider card (from ONS). This change will take effect in early 2014. All in-person chemotherapy courses will cease as of December 31, 2013. The online certificate course will continue to train you on the latest chemotherapy and biotherapy information, but it will allow you to complete the learning over a longer period of time, at your own pace.
The certificate course will continue to follow the same two-year renewal cycle as the two-day course. An annual renewal option will also be available for those whose institutions or states require it. Current chemotherapy provider card holders will need to complete the initial certificate program to establish evidence of their baseline specialty knowledge and will then begin a two-year renewal cycle. If this affects you, ONS will work with you on scheduling and pricing.
We are confident that the chemotherapy training course changes will offer oncology nurses an optimal educational experience, better educational outcomes, and enhanced value. But, consistent with the ONS mission, our goal is that patients will benefit most from these changes.
More information about procedures and enrolling in the certificate course is now available. You can also address specific questions to educationchemo@ons.org.