Nurse Practitioner, Yvonne Panek-Hudson was among this year’s recipients of the Jazz Pharmaceuticals Conference and Travel Scholarships. She was awarded the scholarship to support her attendance at EBMT 2024 in Glasgow . Yvonne hit quite a few goals while she was there: She gave both an oral and a poster presentation, attended the Canada-Australia-New Zealand-United Kingdom Transplant and Cellular Therapies leadership meeting, and networked with bone marrow transplant colleagues from across Europe.

Straight and Marrow podcast

Yvonne’s oral presentation at EBMT was on the Straight and Marrow podcast, a podcast co-created and presented by Yvonne and Alexandra Rivalland to discuss all things allogeneic bone marrow transplant. The Straight and Marrow podcast was developed during COVID times to provide important information to bone marrow transplant patients and their carers anywhere, anytime. The podcast has been a huge success globally with 24 episodes produced over two seasons and over 16,000 downloads to date. The EBMT provided an opportunity to promote the podcast on a world stage. Following EBMT, the Straight and Marrow podcast team have seen an increase in the number of downloads of the podcast and a proposal to do a joint episode with EBMT in the future. Arrow is proud to sponsor the Straight and Marrow podcast and to support Yvonne in travelling to EBMT to present this wonderful resource to her colleagues worldwide.

You can find the Straight and Marrow podcast on Spotify, on Apple podcast, and on a range of other podcast platforms.

In Yvonne’s role as the Clinical Lead for the Allogeneic Bone Marrow Transplant Long Term Follow Up Clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Peter Mac, she sees many adult patients who had their allogeneic bone marrow transplant when they were a child. Adults transplanted as children or adolescents account for 15% of the patients seen by the Long Term Follow Up (LTFU) Clinic and that figure is rising every year as the survivorship of allogeneic bone marrow transplant increases with advances in treatment and supportive care.

On behalf of the LTFU team, Yvonne presented a poster at EBMT titled At First Sight – What adolescents and young adults are telling us at first visit to adult long term follow up. The poster focused on the late effects that patients present with at first visit, as they transition to adult care following an allogeneic bone marrow transplant. This includes the commonly identified and reported physical as well as psycho-social late effects of transplant.

The poster presented data from 83 young adult patients, and showed information regarding the attendance of young adults to the clinic as well as the common late effects these patients experience. This information will be useful in identifying how to encourage attendance and better support of adolescent and young adult bone marrow transplant patients. It is our pleasure to support Yvonne in her presentation of findings regarding this unique cohort of bone marrow transplant patients.

Yvonne was also interested to attend a multidisciplinary session at the EBMT conference that took a novel approach to presenting the patient experience of Allogeneic BMT. This session presented a patient case study, and included a specialist nurse, haematologist and the patient. During the course of the case study each person gave their perspective at each time point from diagnosis and into survivorship. For example, at the patient’s diagnosis of leukaemia the doctor described the diagnostic characteristics of leukaemia, the symptoms the patient presented with and the chosen treatment option. The nurse described the support, education and expert nursing care provided to the patient.

The most impactful part of this session, however, was the patient describing her experience of receiving an unexpected diagnosis of leukaemia. She described her physical symptoms, mental health, and managing hospitalisation, outpatient care and the uncertainty her new diagnosis presented her with. She generously shared how this affected relationships, employment, future parenting and her ongoing physical and mental health issues and management.

This novel approach to presenting the patient story and perspective highlighted the strength in really listening to what patients need from healthcare and healthcare professionals, and Yvonne has recommended trialing a similar approach in a session at the ANZTCT conference in September 2024.