Pedi Nurses doing Adult chemo

[ChrisF]

At the hospital I work, they have started to do adult chemo. The Pedi Onc dept has been in place for over 17 years but the adult dept was shifted to another hospital about 12 years ago. Now with two docs admitting adults, they are asking the peds nurses to go over and give the chemo. The hospital told us "chemo is chemo". The staff of the pedi onc dept is very divided over this. While some of the drugs are the same, they are used in a different manner for cancers we have very little education on. What is the feeling of others on this? We just are not that comfortable doing the adults. Are we just fearing the unknown or are we right to feel the way we do? We just don't know. They are trying to train staff on the adult floor to take over but it is a very slow proccess and will take time.

We have actually moved one patient to the peds floor as the patient needed a cont. 24 hour drip for 7 days and there weren't any qualified nurses on the adult floor to handle it. This created an issue as staff is used to doing mouth care, prophylatic abx for pcp, eye drops etc and and physician refused to do these.

We are just looking for ideas of what other facilities do. Does anyone do both peds and adults?

Chris