Urologic nurse practitioner on collaboration with her care team

In this video, Adity Dutta, MSN, AGACNP-BC, discusses collaboration with the care team at Georgia Urology. Dutta is a nurse practitioner with Georgia Urology.

Transcription:

Could you describe a situation where effective communication and teamwork with urologists and/or other advanced practice providers was essential for a positive patient outcome?

That's a very good question actually. [With] advanced prostate cancer, when we are treating and managing these patients, patients are going through a lot of different issues, not only their prostate-related issues—it's cancer, it's psychological. There is a lot of patient education, teaching, family teaching; all these things are involved. By the same token, there are lots of labs and radiation work-ups and diagnostic studies, PET scans, things like that, that we need to look at. We do have, at Georgia Urology, a great advanced prostate cancer team, led by Dr. Daniel Canter, and his nurse practitioner Caroline Branch, and we work very closely with them. It's very open communication; we talk to each other, email each other about patients. And we do have an excellent radiologist outside of our practice. So we are basically in constant touch with each other in a way that we are all on the same page. It did not happen with me, but I can talk about one of my colleagues, actually, and I would take that privilege to talk about it. She found out the patient was on Eligard, and had onset of seizure. My colleague was asking him questions, and he just suddenly said, "Hey, I just had a bout of seizure." And it just put a red alert on her and she called immediately contacted Caroline Branch and we found that Eligard has an adverse effect of seizure. That being said, we stopped the medication; we took care of that situation.

This transcription was edited for clarity.