"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:

ONS Voice articles:

Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing articles:

Oncology Nursing Forum articles:

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)

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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 systema...