Welcome to the BC Cancer Agency's Just in Time Symptom Management Education Initiative (JIT).

The program is designed to bring oncology nurses the latest bite-sized information that will help them to better understand, assess, manage and evaluate their patients symptoms. We also hope that we will whet your appetite so that you will pursue the references that we provide with each JIT.

Each six to eight weeks, we will post a new JIT, keeping those in place which were previously posted. We propose to cover eight symptoms over the course of the program, and will be looking to you for suggestions about other areas of cancer care that we could similarly handle.

Each symptom will be addressed in the following manner:

1. A summary of the latest evidence concerning the etiology, assessment, management and evaluation of each symptom will be provided
2. References from which the information is summarized will be provided so that nurses can enrich their knowledge of the symptom area
3. The mechanism for obtaining the cited references is to contact Jodi Graham at jgraham@bccancer.bc.ca or by phone at 250.519.5573. Please be prepared to provide your email, fax number or mailing address
4. A post-test assessing the knowledge retained from both the summary and the references will be provided
5. Feedback on each particular symptom area will be provided, so that the nurse can assess if s/he has mastered that symptom area of knowledge
6. Overall feedback from the program's self-test will be tabulated so that the nurses will have an overall sense of his/her cancer symptom management knowledge base

You will be able to use feedback from this program to measure the extent to which you enhance your knowledge of cancer symptom management, which in turn can be used to determine your achievement of both the Registered Nurses Association of British Columbia and the Canadian Association of Nurses in Oncology Standards.

Additionally, we will track your overall scoring on the JIT program, and offer a reward to the nurse who scores the highest total.

Good luck, and good learning!!!