Margie Jenkins is the regional manager for the Baltimore MedStar hospital cancer registries. She has been a cancer registrar for 15 years. Cancer registrars are data information specialists that capture a complete history, diagnosis, treatment and health status on cancer patients, according to the National Cancer Registrars. The data are used in making public health decisions and provide information for diagnosis and treatment education.
What does your job entail?
I oversee the operations of each hospital’s cancer registry, manage staff and participate in the network cancer program activities to ensure continued accreditation with the industry standard setters.
What kind of schooling or training did you go through?
Traditionally, cancer registrars were and still are trained on the job. There are colleges that offer a formal education program in cancer data management. I personally have a bachelor’s degree in management and then later specialized in a health information technology certificate program where I learned about cancer registry.
What inspired you to this career?
When I was getting my education in the health information technology program, my mother was diagnosed with melanoma — a deadly skin cancer. Going through that experience with her and her not surviving her disease made me want to take my newfound skills and somehow apply them within the oncology field.
What do you like best about your job?
What I love about the job is that I get to work with physicians, administrators, researchers and strategic planners. I love that I can provide support for our cancer program’s development by ensuring compliance with our standards and being a resource for cancer information. Overall, I feel that I contribute to the goal of preventing and controlling cancer in our community.
What are the challenges?
One of my biggest challenges has been recruiting and retaining certified cancer registry professionals. There are only 3,000-plus of us nationally. It isn’t an easy field to break into, and I believe that our national organization needs to focus its efforts on marketing the cancer registrar career to our high schools and colleges more. There are formal education programs, but not enough. The curricula include cancer biology and management, biostatistics and epidemiology, cancer abstracting, database record management, cancer program management, cancer registry procedures, among others. If someone has a degree in an allied health field, they need to have taken anatomy and physiology. Having the education will give you the foundation in which to be trained on the job. Training takes 1-2 years, whether it is in a formal education setting or on the job. Within the Baltimore MedStar Hospital cancer registries that I manage there are eight certified cancer registrars, three of which just received their certification in the past two years. Our organization decided to invest in training current employees that possessed the right criteria to become a cancer registrar. It was no easy task but well worth the effort.