The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in late February 2024 called pharmaceutical companies to provide more information and a briefing to explain the ongoing shortages of several cancer drugs, including carboplatin, cisplatin, and methotrexate; amoxicillin; and stimulant medications.

On March 7, 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to zanubrutinib (Brukinsa^®) with obinutuzumab for relapsed or refractory follicular lymphoma after two or more lines of systemic therapy.

President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday urged a U.S. appeals court to preserve a federal mandate that requires health insurers to cover preventive care services, including HIV-preventing medication and cancer screenings, at no extra cost to patients. “These are preventive services provisions that are critical and lifesaving to millions of Americans,” Daniel Aguilar, a lawyer for the government, told a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals during arguments in the administration’s appeal.

On March 6, 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved nivolumab (Opdivo^®) in combination with cisplatin and gemcitabine for first-line treatment of adult patients with unresectable or metastatic urothelial carcinoma.

My husband is a geriatrician.

My oldest daughter first became a music therapist and then completed an accelerated program in nursing. She is passionate about caring for older adults, just like her father. She completed her master’s degree in nursing and is now working as a palliative care nurse practitioner in a very busy urban university trauma center.

On March 5, 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that Smiths Medical ASD Inc. is recalling its Medfusion model 3500 syringe pump because of issues associated with earlier software versions, including high-priority alarms during motor issues, wrong infusion restarts, screen locks, bolus interruptions, incorrect dose displays, low doses, motor errors, wrong settings recall, corrupt configurations, auto locks, and toolbox issues with loading dose time values.

On March 6, 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved inotuzumab ozogamicin (Besponsa^®) for pediatric patients aged 1 year and older with relapsed or refractory CD22-positive B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Regular moderate- to high-intensity exercise can improve quality of life, fatigue, social function, and symptom management in patients with metastatic breast cancer, researchers reported in recent study findings. The results of the PREFERABLE-EFFECT study, presented at the 2023 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, demonstrated that regular exercise is safe and has positive effects for patients with metastatic breast cancer.

If 90% of success is preparation, how can one undergraduate lecture on oncology possibly be enough to prepare nurses to successfully care for the nearly 40% of Americans diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes?

RNs in the United States will see an average of 193,100 annual job openings from 2020–2030, with a 6% increase in employment—faster than the average for all occupations—the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in November 2023. Four years into the timeline for that statistical forecast, we need to take a pulse on continuing to grow not only the profession of nursing but also the oncology speciality.