by Teresa Miceili, RN, BSN, OCN (Mayo Clinic-College of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota; IMF Nurse Leadership Board Member)
As summer comes to a close, now is a great time for oncology nurses to hit the books. The International Myeloma Foundation’s website, myeloma.org, provides information about continuing nursing education opportunities and dozens of links to relevant publications on the latest in myeloma nursing care.
Because the landscape of multiple myeloma care is continually evolving, the IMF wants to provide you with resources to stay abreast of the most reliable and current therapy options.
As a myeloma nurse, the information you need may vary, depending on whether you are a Registered Nurse or Nurse Practitioner. As you know, myeloma nurses have different practice areas, including infusion, stem cell transplant care, hospital settings, and ambulatory care. To complicate learning further, myeloma itself is a complex disease with a heterogeneous patient population. Myeloma patients may be at very different stages of their individual disease including newly diagnosed, relapsed, or relapsed/refractory, among others.
The IMF’s Nurse Leadership Board (NLB) seeks to simplify the complexity of myeloma nursing care. We recommend that you explore our many resources at
As you conduct your research, you may find books to be reliable resources that also point to additional references. We do recommend you consider perusing Multiple Myeloma: A Textbook for Nurses (Second Edition), authored by the Nurse Leadership Board’s Joseph Tariman, PhD, RN, ANP-BC, FAAN; and Beth Faiman, PhD, RN, MSN, APRN-BC, AOCN®. While an excellent resource, you may find that you need more recently published information.
If that’s the case, we recommend you explore professional, peer-reviewed journals. Searchable databases of these resources include:
- PubMed.gov
- Google Scholar
- The NLB publications on myeloma.org
- International Myeloma Working Group publications
- and institutional library services.
If you are not familiar with top nursing journals, we recommend the following publications as a starting point:
- Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing (CJON)
- Seminars on Oncology Nursing (SON)
- and the Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Advanced Oncology (JADPRO).
Finally, we encourage you to take part in webinars throughout the year. The IMF website has an archive of our NLB publications and our past nursing education webinars. Happy learning!