Patrick Jahn – We need an inter-professional body to improve quality of life in cancer patients

Nursing Research Unit head discusses projects to improve training of academic nurses and advance cancer pain management

Regret is a vicious beast to overcome. Without reflection, however, there can be no tangible progress. For Patrick Jahn, this reflection first reared its head during his basic training as a nurse and has continued to crop up throughout his professional life. As head of the Nursing Research Unit at University Hospital Halle, Jahn continues to evolve and try to improve the situation for nurses in Germany. This growth has solidified his impression that every failure is a learning experience, an episode of trial and error.

In November 2017, Jahn joined 17 other health and health care professionals at Schloss Leopoldskron as a member of the first cohort of Sciana – The Health Leaders Network. His colleagues concluded their third meeting last week on June 15, 2018. This Network was launched in collaboration with Salzburg Global Seminar and provides members from the UK, Germany, and Switzerland with space for inspiration and learning on health care policy and innovation around the world.

For his part, Jahn has dedicated much of his career to advocating for a better basic nursing education system in Germany. Nursing there has traditionally been a vocational profession. However, there has been a shift in recent decades towards nurses gaining more academic qualifications.

“I [had] basic training as a nurse in Germany and was in professional training and then I worked four years in the nursing field… I asked myself what would be the difference in my basic professional work if I would have [been] more reflective… during this early stage of work… We should [always] have reflective capacity on a day to day practice.”

Years later, Jahn has demonstrated his passion for both improving basic nursing education in Germany, as well as cancer nursing. He helped develop a post-basic cancer care curriculum for the European Oncology Nursing Society, which was released in Brussels in May 2018. This organisation - made up of around 30 member states - structured the new framework around training hours, various learning areas, goals, and competencies of cancer nurses. Now in its “fourth version,” it allows for a unified perspective of what defines cancer nursing in Europe.

Jahn said, “It’s a very challenging system because we have very different backgrounds… you have the new case system, a very academic focus system and you have the German system where… you have some training hours… The system is now more placed in a way where you can [also] follow the course of treatment, starting with prevention procedures and coming to [survival and priority] care.”

A significant focus of Jahn’s career in nursing has been on supportive care and cancer symptom management. One of the major challenges in this area, he noted, is gaining a more professional perspective in health care research. He stressed taking a “very broad approach to help the patients” and giving “comprehensive help” could assist in both improving quality of life and extending overall survival time in cancer patients. When it comes to symptom management, Jahn said, “In each situation, not only one profession can bring the solution for this; it’s more [a] connected few.”

He added, “You need [an] inter-professional body to deal with the problems, and from the nursing professions, we are missing the clinical focused researchers, and also the clinical research physicians in practice.”

Jahn exemplified the concept of an inter-professional perspective on interventions with a clinical trial he participated in while earning his Ph.D. at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. This study concentrated on pain management in cancer patients, as well as institutional, training, and patient-related barriers involved in pain reduction medication, such as fear of addiction. He “developed an intervention scheme where we could easily train nurses to give the right information to the patient to overcome [these] pain related barriers.”

Jahn has been very active in utilising the lessons from Sciana and other members of the network. He’s in the process of organising a hackathon with Tobias Gantner, the founder of HealthCare Futurists in Germany, another member. He’d like to discuss further how to meld “social innovation with digital innovation in terms of making better health care supply happen and develop new models of business.”

The nursing research unit where Jahn works also received a research grant to help a larger group of researchers develop “innovative health care solutions based on digital assistance systems,” a topic broadly discussed at the November 2017 Sciana meeting. Furthermore, Jahn, along with several other members of the Network, launched a “nationwide project to help institutions to include academic nurses in their institutional frame.”

“We [did] a large project with Bernadette Klapper with the Robert Bosch Stiftung, and I was also [on] the board of this project… There was a press release, and we opened a homepage, and now we have a lot of working materials for institutions.”
Jahn described his time with the Sciana Network as “eye-opening,” adding the strength of the Network lies in the valuable contributions of its members. The connections Jahn has made, both from a professional and a personal standpoint, will stand the test of time.

“Everything comes together [and] makes a very interesting, very comprehensive picture,” he said. “If you are open to [listening] to what everyone will contribute, you might draw a picture in what direction we move on... you can have a glance on the future development during this Network.”