EONS, its primary purpose is to represent cancer nurses across Europe and to ensure that best practice is shared across all the countries. We do that mainly through grants and awards, education and also sponsoring newer societies to look at what their own particular country might benefit from. It’s been in existence for about thirty years, so it’s well established, and it’s a very successful organisation, actually, for cancer nurses.
How long have you been doing these conferences and what are the current themes?
This is the tenth EONS congress and over the years we’ve been to different parts of Europe and we’ve come to Dublin this year really to look at the changing challenges that are happening in a very complex health environment. We heard this morning about the many demands that are being placed on the health system in all countries and some of the inequalities that are present for people being diagnosed with cancer and the role that nursing can bring, both in terms of prevention and early detection but also in terms of treatment, living beyond cancer and helping to live or die with the disease.
The programme is actually very varied this year and it’s very high quality. There’s a really good mixture of very practical issues with some really cutting edge research and really new information that nurse researchers have been working on. So this morning I was chairing a session on caregivers, the needs of caregivers, and these are people who are unpaid, often family members, who are caring for people with cancer and who then themselves may experience anxiety and depression and worry about their loved ones and how we can support them in a system that’s already under a lot of pressure. It’s questions like that. Another session was looking at the needs of children of parents, if their parents have cancer, and what are the needs of children in that context. So there’s a wide range of topics being explored in this congress and it really shows the maturity of oncology nursing research to be able to share this range of work at a meeting such as this.
What will your next event be?
Our next event will be the ECCO 17 event which will be in Amsterdam in January. That’s in conjunction with ECCO and that’s the large ECCO 17 event. Nursing is at the heart of that event; we have nursing throughout the programme but we also have a society day at the beginning which is purely a tailored programme around nursing and issues like leadership and resources and dealing with workforce challenges. Because the issue for nursing at the moment is to recruit people into the profession and to keep them motivated and we have a problem across Europe of both of those things. So we’re trying to address that in some of these meetings that we’ve arranged.
In five years’ time my Presidency will be over but having survived for thirty years and developed into this very successful organisation, we’d like to take it to the next level, to have even more members, to do more international collaboration such as with the Oncology Nursing Society in the United States and with Australian colleagues, to ensure that the Eastern European countries who have got a large challenge with cancer morbidity and mortality that we bring their nurses on board, we ensure that they are given the opportunities that we in the West have enjoyed for many years. So there’s lots still to do, there’s lots of work to do.
