Profiling the beginning of Providence Integrative Cancer Care
Providence Regional Cancer System
Recently our very own Rosemary Spyhalsky, Nurse Coordinator for the Providence Integrative Cancer Care Program was profiled by the Oncology Nursing Society’s Special Interest Group for Complementary & Integrative Therapies.
As a passionate advocate of integrative cancer care, Rosemary is board certified in both oncology and holistic nursing. While the focus of the article is meant to guide Rosemary’s peers in starting their own integrative cancer care programs, we thought it was important to profile some of Rosemary’s main points:
The history of our program
At the time when the idea first came to Rosemary to pursue offering body-mind-spirit care to patients, this was a relatively new concept. Some of the major cancer centers offered services such as acupuncture, massage, yoga, etc, but there was nothing like this in the any of the cancer centers located in the South Sound, and the medical community was very skeptical about the benefits of such services. After 3 years of research and work behind the scenes, the program got off the ground in 2007 with oncology massage, yoga, a nutrition class, and acupuncture. Naturopathy was added a year later.
The benefits of connecting the complementary services to medical cancer treatments
According to the National Institute of Health almost half of all Americans use at least one complementary and alternative medicine in addition to their regular medical care, but most do not tell their providers. Having the Integrative Cancer Care Program embedded into Providence Regional Cancer System is a valuable resource for patients. Patients have convenient access to complementary services to utilize in conjunction with their medical cancer treatments and may share more openly with physicians about other treatments they are using if they see such services offered within the cancer clinic. Services offered are safe to use in conjunction with conventional medical care.
The importance of licensure
Establishing requirements for providers was assisted by the fact that in Washington state naturopathy, massage therapy and acupuncture can all be licensed through the Department of Health. Dietitians are certified through the same regulatory body, and also obtain a national certification. In the case of yoga, there is no licensure, so certification through a respected national certification body was a requirement. In addition, when and where possible, specialized oncology training has been sought for providers.
To find out more about the Providence Integrative Cancer Care program please visit the integrative care website at provcancer.org Once there, you can read more about our program, services, and the benefits of complementary care or integrative medicine. You can also view a list of local and national resources by clicking on the Resources tab on the left hand side of the page.
Reader Comments (2)
Very nice program. Good to know that there's a lot of people and organizations right now are helping hand in hand to fight cancer.
- Kevin Weiss
Thank you very much for this great information. More interesting, I have learned a lot of this topic. Thanks for sharing.