UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology APRIL 2023 - Flipbook - Page 30
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
VIRTUAL BRACHYTHERAPY
NURSING SYMPOSIUM
Our Editor caught up with Kayla Kafka-Peterson, a Nursing Supervisor in the Department
of Radiation Oncology and the Scientific Chair of the recent Virtual Nursing Symposium in
partnership with the American Brachytherapy Society.
This past fall, you helmed and were the
Scientific Chair of the Virtual Nursing
Symposium in partnership with the American
Brachytherapy Society. Tell me about the
symposium and the purpose of creating it.
Photography Credit: Joshua Sudock
K: Brachytherapy nursing/patient care resources
are very scarce, on an international level. Over
my past 11 years as a brachytherapy nurse, I
have struggled to find any resources applicable
to nursing in this field. All resources are for
physicians and physics, but I could not find any
for direct patient care. During my time at UCLA,
any nursing information we have available has
been built by our team for our own use.
I first brought up this gap at the American
Brachytherapy Society’s (ABS) International
Congress back in 2018. I spoke with the ABS
President at the time, and received immediate
offer of support from the society on building
content to help address this gap. This was a
daunting task at that point, as it was time outside
of work to create information on a field I felt I
had not yet become an expert in. I wasn’t sure I
had the knowledge to teach at the level I wanted
to teach things at or provide the quality I felt
the material needed. I thought about it for some
time to make sure that the time commitment
was something I was willing to take on outside of
work. I decided that even if the material I could
create wasn’t textbook-quality, it was a starting
point to start a conversation and hopefully help
someone, somewhere needing brachytherapy
nursing guidance. That was 5 years ago.
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Momentum started to build in 2019. I was invited
to give a nursing lecture at the national congress
that year. However, I was expecting my first child
in the same month as the conference, so flying
out of state was not feasible. We then made plans
to give a few nursing lectures at an event in early
2020, for which I found speakers and created my
own content/lectures as well, but then COVID hit
and all medical conferences everywhere were
postponed for a few years (as I am sure we all
experienced!)
Finally, 2022 is the year that we were able to
move forward. The American Brachytherapy
Society reached out and expressed full support
of a nursing symposium, which we concluded
would be held in late 2022 and dedicated solely
to brachytherapy nursing and patient care. We
chose to hold the event virtually to reach as
many people as we could. We spent 2022 finding
speakers, building content and lectures, and
finding brachytherapy nurses and patient care
teams worldwide. We created a distribution list
for updates through ABS. The event was held
on November 17, 2022, and was the first of its
kind. Over 125 nurses from five continents
(and all hours of the day/night!) joined this live
event and the feedback was overwhelmingly
positive. Almost immediately, the chat box
on the online platform was overflowing with
gratitude for finally establishing a brachytherapy
nursing community. Even knowing one or two
experienced brachytherapy nurses makes a
difference, but this brought together so much
more than that.