The Centre Visit Educational Scholarship provides the opportunity for members to gain experience and a different perspective in their area of interest. Applicants need to identify a centre that is willing to accommodate them for the duration of the centre visit. The EBMT Nurses Group funds €1,000.00 for travel and accommodation.
By Justine Wagner
Transplant Nurse, University Medical Centre Schleswig-Holstein - Campus Kiel (UKSH Kiel), Germany
“In May of 2024, I was fortunate to visit the Haematology and Bone Marrow Transplantation Unit of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, Italy owing to the generous EBMT nursing exchange stipend grant. I graduated my nursing training in 2016 in Germany and since then have been working on the bone marrow transplantation ward at the University Hospital in Kiel. My motivation was to compare my single-centre experience to the practices on a different and well renowned transplantation ward. Therefore, I chose the internationally famed San Raffaele Hospital in Milan for a two-week nursing exchanging.
There, I was welcomed warmly by the staff and assigned to English-speaking nurses to guide me through their day. And in fact, I came to realise numerous differences both in medical practices as well as in nursing routines and procedures. What stuck out to me, was the joined nursing team handling both the acute leukaemia ward and the bone marrow transplantation ward (which on top are jointly located on a shared corridor). In my home-centre, we are used to having separate teams that are highly specialised in either induction therapy and initial diagnosis patients or cell-based therapy. However, seeing the daily routines at the San Raffaele, where nursing staff is assigned to either part of the ward on a daily basis, I definitely learned the potential of having this broader approach to the patients and their disease course.
Another difference to my home centre was the spectrum of therapies that were offered. While annual stem cell transplantation counts are comparable between our centres, San Raffaele has a focus on novel stem cell-based protocols sometimes involving genetic modifications of the graft. I saw a patient with glioblastoma receiving a modified autologous stem cell transplant as part of a phase-I clinical trial, as well as children undergoing routine gene therapy for Wiskott-Aldrich-Syndrome, an inborn genetic defect affecting hematopoietic cells that leads to debilitating immunosuppression in affected children.
During my stay I took a lot of notes. Many more small things like connectors for chemotherapy drip systems or the handling of mucositis and pain differed enormously from what I was accustomed to. So, while two-weeks might not seem too long, I definitely came home with a plethora of things to discuss with my colleagues. While most of the times, there was no clear “winning” choice in doing things, no right or wrong, I feel like I profited immensely from the exposure to a different setting. Most importantly, I got introduced to caring and hard-working nurses from another country with whom I will try to stay in contact and who I hope to see again in the future. So, if you get the chance, I can only encourage you to apply for the EBMT nursing exchange yourself.”