Time to Travel: Part Two Chicago!

The next part in my travels was the big trip. This was the trip that took a lot of planning and time to get right, but I can say it was worth it! For the international aspect of my travel scholarship I decided to reach out to Professor Judith Paice. Professor Paice is a world renowned nursing leader and expert in cancer-related pain. I had seen Professor Paice speak at a conference a few years prior and was really excited to spend some time working with her and learn from her experience of caring for those living with cancer-related pain.

Getting to Chicago was a little complicated, the first step was to reach out to Professor Paice and make sure she was able and willing to host me. I was a little nervous that she would say no, as I was an unknown person from the UK trying to arrange a visit following a global pandemic. However, this was probably the easier step as Profession Paice was lovely and extremely helpful and was more than happy for me to come and spend some time with her. The next hurdle was to navigate the paperwork, this included occupational heath clearance and I had to get some additional vaccines before I was able to visit the hospital. The vaccines was a bit of a learning curve for me, and took a bit of investigative work and time to find a service that was able to give me the missing vaccines that I needed in order to visit the hospital site.

Before I knew it all the paperwork was completed and I was off! The city itself was beautiful. I could happily spend hours sitting by the lake the watching the world go by. This was my first experience of the great Great Lakes and it still amazes me to this day.

The visit itself with Professor Paice and working in Northwestern Hospital has been a highlight of my nursing career to date. I have only ever working in the NHS and so experiencing a different health system was fascinating. I think the thing that I found most fascinating is that the issues aren't too dissimilar. lack of staff and lack of support for those living with the impact of cancer-related pain. Professor Paice is truly an inspiration and the impact she has on her patients is phenomenal. I had the privilege of spending 5 days with her and was able to see patients across different settings in the hospital. I took so much away from those 5 days it's hard to summaries this experience in this blog. One of the things I was interested to see in action was access to medications, in particular opioids.

It's no secret that in recent years the USA has had issues with an opioid epidemic. I was interested to see how this has impacted on this living with cancer-related pain and how it matches up to my experiences from working in the UK. while the UK doesn't have the same issues regarding access to opioids what is evident is that the stigma around opioid use is universal. Given the focus in the media around risks of addiction, this is a fear that I have come across a lot in not only patients but their family and healthcare professions caring for them.

What I noticed from a US perspective is the challenges of getting access to opioids from local pharmacy. A lot of local pharmacies have restrictions on what, if any opioids they carry and this can be a major barrier to people accessing them. While we don't have this issue in the UK, the stigma around opioid use is the universal factor that I noticed across the US and UK. Again this comes back to same themes I found during my UK travels. That is to ensure healthcare professionals have the correct knowledge, skills and confidence to be able to support those impacted by cancer-related pain. This visit really helped me to consolidate my thinking and put all this into my PhD proposal.