Research Nurses for Clinical Trials of Anti-Cancer Drugs: Developing a New Subspecialty in Taiwan

Experienced research nurses are indispensable in conducting high-quality clinical trials of anti-cancer drugs. They ensure patients' compliance, as well as physicians' attention to the details of study protocols, which are typically associated with significant treatment-related toxicity and tedious schedules of patient monitoring. In the past 10 years, the number of research nurses in the Oncology Society of Taiwan increased from four to 24. Most of them are located at the affiliate hospitals of the Taiwan Cooperative Oncology Group (TCOG), the National Health Research Institute (NHRI), and the Cancer Research Center of National Taiwan University College of Medicine (NTUMC). Although oncology research nurses are rapidly becoming a new subspecialty in Taiwan, major obstacles exist. The first obstacle comes from the society of nursing, opinion leaders of which are, for obscure reasons, reluctant to recognize this new subspecialty. The second obstacle comes from the research funding organizations, which generally lack a suitable category of personnel for research nurses. It is critical that these problems be solved as soon as possible. Further, the training program for and the mechanism of certification of oncology research nurses should also be enforced in the future.