J&J shines spotlight on cancer specialty profession in new awareness and support effort

Mul­ti­ple myelo­ma is a rare and com­plex blood can­cer and of­ten in­cludes ad­vanced prac­tice providers, or APPs, as part of the pa­tient care team. But even many myelo­ma pa­tients aren’t fa­mil­iar with the term, ac­cord­ing to a J&J Janssen On­col­o­gy sur­vey done in con­junc­tion with the Ad­vanced Prac­ti­tion­ers So­ci­ety for Hema­tol­ogy & On­col­o­gy (AP­SHO).

The US sur­vey found 36% of mul­ti­ple myelo­ma pa­tients weren’t aware of the term APP, which is typ­i­cal­ly a nurse prac­ti­tion­er or physi­cian as­sis­tant with spe­cial­ty train­ing, in this case for myelo­ma blood can­cers. Once they un­der­stood who APPs were though, 93% agreed they are es­sen­tial to pa­tient care. A ma­jor­i­ty (61%) al­so said they were more com­fort­able ask­ing their APPs ques­tions than ask­ing their doc­tors or on­col­o­gists.

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