One of the most pow­er­ful teach­ing strate­gies is the use of case stud­ies, and so I wanted to share a per­sonal expe­ri­ence that recently taught me a valu­able lesson.

My husband’s best friend of more than 50 years has myelodys­plas­tic syn­drome, and we have shared his treat­ment jour­ney with him and his wife. He has expe­ri­enced prob­lems with low counts in all cell lines and has been myelo­sup­pressed, espe­cially dur­ing his treat­ment. He received the stan­dard edu­ca­tion on neu­tropenic pre­cau­tions from his health­care team. One of the things they told him was “don’t gar­den.” He has a pond on his land, and last sum­mer he was out dredg­ing it with his back­hoe. The con­se­quences of this activ­ity were dev­as­tat­ing. He was hos­pi­tal­ized with cryp­to­coc­cal menin­gi­tis and spent more than three months in a reha­bil­i­ta­tion facil­ity receiv­ing IV ampho­tericin B. He also expe­ri­enced nerve dam­age in one leg from the infec­tion and now has trou­ble walk­ing and get­ting out of a chair.

No mat­ter how many years of nurs­ing expe­ri­ence we have, we can con­tinue to learn from cases such as this one. As a patient, my husband’s friend never made the link between gar­den­ing and dig­ging in his pond. As a health­care pro­fes­sional, it seemed so obvi­ous to me. I thought about how oncol­ogy nurses, through more cus­tomized patient edu­ca­tion, have the oppor­tu­nity to change the out­come of sit­u­a­tions like this. By tak­ing the time to learn a bit more about our patients—for exam­ple, what types of activ­i­ties they like to do—this ill­ness and hos­pi­tal­iza­tion might have been averted. By cus­tomiz­ing stan­dard edu­ca­tion into terms that were more mean­ing­ful for him, the emo­tional costs as well as the insur­ance costs of being hos­pi­tal­ized for such a long time could pos­si­bly have been avoided.

As we work toward health­care reform and seek to inte­grate qual­ity out­comes and patient safety into prac­tice, this story struck me as demon­strat­ing the incred­i­ble power that nurses have to make a dif­fer­ence in patients’ lives and their clin­i­cal outcomes.