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Press Releases
HCRC Researchers Seek To Educate Oncology Nurses About Nutrition
Columbia, Mo. (March 22, 2005) - Eating your way to a better health may soon be more than just another cliché for sensible living. Foods whose benefits extend well beyond diet are the new frontier in nutritional research as scientists are looking for ways to make foods not merely nutritional but therapeutic.
Current research suggests that nutrition is not only essential in maintaining one’s health, but plays an important role as adjunctive therapy in people suffering from chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes.
Proper nutrition could play an especially integral part in the treatment of cancer patients, by helping them better weather aggressive radiation treatment and chemotherapy.
But taking this knowledge out of the lab and to the plates of those who may need it the most isn’t always an easy task. While oncology nurses report they feel responsible in providing nutritional advice to patients, only a small number of them describe themselves as knowledgeable about the benefits of functional foods, found a recent survey conducted by the Health Communication Research Center (HCRC) at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
HCRC researchers are currently completing a project that seeks to find ways to educate oncology nurses about functional foods, as well as to help them trickle down such knowledge to cancer patients. The center recently tested a web-based educational module designed to help nurses better understand the health benefits of functional foods and how they can be integrated into the overall treatment of people with cancer. The module will become the basis for a nurse-training program to prepare nurses to disseminate nutritional knowledge about functional foods to patients.
“The nurse-patient interaction is a major component of the nursing activity and when it comes to nutrition, our research has shown that over 85 percent of the oncology nurses usually receive questions about nutrition from their patients,” says HCRC researcher Mugur V. Geana, M.D., and a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “One of our strategies will be to emphasize the role of the nurse as a social model for the cancer patient. By doing this we will address the two major components--personal and professional--that we hope will enhance the nurse compliance with the program.”
While the study was conducted among oncology nurses, insights gleaned from the project can be applied to nurses working in various medical specialties.
The next phase of the project will be to fine-tune the program and make it available for nurses nationwide. The modules will be updated periodically to reflect the latest advancements in the field of functional foods. The modules will be available via X-Train, an online training software developed by Purdue University, one of the partners in the project.
Implementing the program within X-Train will be the latest step in a four-year research effort to assess knowledge of functional foods among oncology nurses across the nation.
Some of the project’s research milestones include a national survey of oncology nurses to gauge pre-existing knowledge about functional foods, followed by a series of interviews with both nurses and hospital administrators to identify channels for continuous nursing education.
The project, sponsored by the Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems, is a collaboration among the University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne and Purdue University.
The principal investigator of the study is HCRC co-director Glen T. Cameron, Ph.D., professor of Strategic Communication and Advertising and Maxine Wilson Gregory Chair in Journalism Research at the Missouri School of Journalism.
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