Abby Thomas, RN, Oncology Nurse Navigator:
Hi, I’m Abby, I’m one of the nurse navigators at the Cancer Center. We have three of us. I’ve been a nurse for 17 years. I joined the Tahoe Forest team in 2010 and have been in the cancer center program for 6 years, and I’m incredibly proud to be part of the team.
Kim Osburn, RN, Oncology Nurse Navigator:
My name is Kim, I am one of the oncology nurse navigators at the Tahoe Forest Cancer Center. I have been a nurse for 19 years, and working with oncology patients is definitely the most fulfilling job I have had to date.
As nurse navigators, we are the first contact of patients that are referred to our center, oftentimes right after they’ve just been given their diagnosis of a new cancer, and we follow patients all the way to consult and then help educate them for their treatments, whether it’s chemotherapy, targeted therapy, or immunotherapy. We are there to support each patient and their goals and their care providers.
We support our community through nurse navigation in a couple different ways. When people find out that they have cancer, and it’s usually from their primary doctor, understandably it’s a very jarring experience, and so we try to help people make sense of that. As a community cancer center, we’re oftentimes having patients seen at what we call tertiary or academic centers, those are specialty centers, ones that are in our area are UCSF, Stanford, UC Davis, who we’re closely aligned with. The patients then are coming back to us with that specialty opinion, and are oftentimes able to then get care back close to home, so either their radiation therapy, their chemo medication therapy, or surgical therapy. Those are kind of the three different ways that cancers are treated, and we’re really proud to provide exceptional care to our community.
The team members of the cancer center are people who come from these large academic institutions and are now really excited to be working close to home again.
Abby Thomas, RN, Oncology Nurse Navigator:
I’m Abby, I work with Lindsay and Kim in nurse navigation at the Tahoe Forest Cancer Center, and we are proud Tahoe Forest Health System employees.
