EONS Newsletter January 2021

We hope that you all managed to take a break over Christmas with family and friends and had an opportunity for at least a brief rest. Now 2021 is underway, the pandemic is still putting a huge strain on everyone in the healthcare environment, and the knock-on effect on our cancer patients is extremely worrying. The vaccine is bringing hope however that in a few months things will start to improve. In the meantime, EONS supports you as you go through this very difficult time. We hope that you will find a moment to read this newsletter and perhaps find inspiration from the good things that will be happening later this year when we will, we hope, be able to get together again.

We congratulate EONS former President Andreas Charalambous (Cyprus) who has been elected as President-Elect of the European Cancer Organisation, with effect from 1 January 2021. Consequently, Johan De Munter (Belgium), EONS President-Elect, has now taken over the position of EONS President. Welcome Johan! You will be hearing more from our new president about his exciting plans for the future of our organisation over the coming weeks and months.

As a result of recent changes, EONS launched a call for nominations for candidates for a new EONS President-Elect and a new Board member. Nominations closed on 15 January and the final list of nominees was announced on Monday 18 January 2021. The call for voting is now open: deadline Thursday 28 January at 12.00 noon CET. The election result will be announced by email to the membership on Monday 1 February 2021 and confirmed during an extraordinary online General Meeting on Tuesday 16 February (TBC). Once confirmed, the President-Elect and the Executive Board member will immediately take up post for their term of office until September 2023.  
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Following the cancellation of the 2020 ESO EONS Masterclass in Oncology Nursing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are now delighted to be able to announce that the 13^th ESO-EONS Masterclass will now take place in Tallinn, Estonia, from 7-11 July 2021. The masterclass will be held in parallel with the ESO-ESMO Baltic and Eurasia Masterclass in Clinical Oncology, to allow learning exchange among nurses and doctors. The Masterclass aims to prepare cancer nurses for future senior roles and enhance their clinical knowledge in the management of the cancer patient during all phases of the cancer journey.
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The EONS Cancer Nursing Index (ECNI) provides a snapshot of a country’s cancer nursing development, viewed from the profession. Each country’s national ECNI profile can now be downloaded from the EONS website. The profiles are an important part of the continuing work to achieve EONS’ vision that cancer nursing will be recognised by the cancer community and national- and European-level policy makers, as a profession with specialised training and qualifications available across the continent. Leading cancer nursing experts were invited to respond to the results before these documents were published and it is also important to point out that the number of responding nurses in the ECNI vary between countries and regional differences occur. The plan is to update the ECNI in 2022 with comparisons. 
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EONS EWG is looking for a person who is actively engaged in education related to cancer nursing, either in the university or clinical education setting, who has the time, enthusiasm and commitment to help EONS develop the education of cancer nurses across Europe. We are looking for a member preferably from outside the UK and Spain with proficiency in English. Should you be interested in joining, please provide a maximum two-page CV and letter of interest, including reasons for wanting to join the group and a summary of what you would bring to it, to Rudi Brike at eons.secretariat@cancernurse.eu Deadline: 2 February 2021
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EONS congratulates Ani Khmaladze, a member of the Advocacy Working Group, on being nominated as a Community Hero in the Women and Global Health ‘100 Outstanding Women Nurse and Midwife Leaders’ awards! Ani is a leader in oncology nursing in Georgia. She currently works at the Caucasus Medical Center, Tbilisi, Georgia, and is the chair and representative from the Georgian Oncology Nursing Society, which she helped found to bring oncology nurses together in her country. She has also recently recovered from Covid-19. She said: “This nomination is a great honour and it means a lot to me and to all cancer nurses in my country.”
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We would like to invite our current members with their membership ending in December 2020, and our Society/Associate members to renew their membership.Updated information regarding rates and a registration form are available in the membership section of the EONS website and email reminders are being sent out. We look forward to receiving your fees for the coming year and to working together in 2021 to further EONS’ mission and goals to advance cancer nursing across Europe.
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For those of you who missed the live NutriCaNurse webinar on 26 November 2020, you can now access it on the EONS YouTube channel, or via the EONS web page. This high quality event looked at the issues around cancer and malnutrition and described the main causes and mechanisms associated with nutritional problems in cancer patients. There was a focus on the different tools used to evaluate risk, the treatments and care interventions available, and on educating patients about this important part of their recovery. (NB. You can also switch on English subtititles by clicking the small white icon "CC" on the bottom right of the video.)
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EONS educational webinar on advanced breast cancer (ABC) will take place as a live event on Monday, 22 February, 2021 from 2-3.30pm CET in English, or alternatively with either German or Spanish subtitles. The 90-minute webinar will provide an overview of advanced breast cancer types, treatment options, usual sites of metastases and how to manage symptoms and continue to live well.
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We are pleased to announce that EONS’ first mobile app, “ProsCApp”, is now available in two new languages: Dutch and Greek. The app aims to assist cancer nurses in assessing and addressing the needs of patients diagnosed with prostate cancer according to the latest evidence-based assessment tools and management interventions. The app is available on both Apple's AppStore and Google's Play store. Just follow the links at: http://proscapp.inspirecenter.org. We welcome any feedback!
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European Cancer Nursing Day (ECND) will take place on 18 May 2021. This exciting flagship EONS event will, due to COVID-19, take place online again this year. We will focus on the impact cancer nurses can have on preventing cancer. More details of this, and how you can join in, will be revealed soon. So, stay tuned and put this important date in your diary. It’s going to be a wonderful day when we will celebrate cancer nursing together throughout Europe. In the meantime, you can revisit a selection of pictures from ECND2020, when we campaigned on the issue of safety. 
Revisit ECND2020

We are delighted to announce that, for the 4th year, EONS will be holding a 3-day nursing track alongside the ESMO Congress 2021. The conference theme will be Cancer Nursing: Towards a new era in cancer care. At this moment, the conference is being planned to take place physically in Paris, France, on September 17-21, 2020, Covid-19 pandemic permitting. Alternatively, it will be a virtual event again. Please mark your calendars and stay tuned for further information. In the meantime, why not visit last year’s conference, relive some of those memories and watch some of the sessions that you didn’t have a chance to experience at the time. 
Relive EONS13

Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. The World Health Organization (WHO) launched a year-long global campaign for World No Tobacco Day 2021 - “Commit to Quit". The new WHO Quit Challenge on WhatsApp and the publication “More than 100 reasons to quit tobacco" are important tools and resources to make a successful attempt to stop smoking. The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the importance of disease prevention when it comes to smoking, drinking and unhealthy diets. Worldwide around 780 million people say they want to quit smoking, but only 30% of them have access to the tools that can help them do so. WHO calls all governments to ensure their citizens have access to brief advice, toll-free quit lines, mobile and digital cessation services, nicotine replacement therapies and other tools that are proven to help people quit, and it estimates that this campaign will support at least 100 million people as they try to give up tobacco through communities of quitters. Cessation services improve health, save lives and save money. The WHO has also nominated 2021 as Year of the Health and Care Workers ; it will be an interesting time to highlight the role of cancer nurses in tobacco and nicotine product cessation as well. 
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 “As healthcare professionals and patient advocacy organisations representing cancer patients and their families, our aim is to work together to ensure that WHO’s first principle is adhered to: to reduce deaths and disease burden and protect those who most need protection.”

EONS Supports ESMO’s Call to Action to Protect Cancer Patients

One in three adult Europeans suffers from chronic disease and more than 80% die from it. Early reports indicate that these patients, especially diabetics, cardiovascular, respiratory and cancer patients are at high risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chronic disease patients were more vulnerable to infection, more frequently hospitalised, were more severely ill, as illustrated by more admissions to intensive care units (ICUs), and had higher mortality rates than the general population. Furthermore, our healthcare systems were unprepared to respond to such an emergency, which resulted in severe disruptions in care delivery, including postponement of ‘non-urgent’ interventions because many patients feared infection or placing an additional burden on healthcare workers. 2020 highlighted that health should be our number one priority towards building sustainable social and economic environment but nevertheless, less than 10% of European investment is spent in health prevention. EONS is participating in an ESMO campaign to ensure that cancer patients are prioritised with a COVID vaccine in order to protect them against the virus.
Link to slides and recording of webinar
Link to online version of Call to Action
Find out more about the challenges of people with chronic illnesses during the pandemic

The pandemic has made it blatantly clear that health is not only a national issue, it is also a European one. The European Commission (EC) announced that it expects to deliver an ambitious and pragmatic Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP) on 3 February. The entire cancer community looks forward to concrete proposals by the EC to work with EU Member States in order to make our healthcare systems more effective, accessible, resilient and more responsive to crisis in the future. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated that international collaboration and investments in research and development could make possible the creation and authorisation of a new vaccine within a  year. Yet, an effective treatment for cancer is not even close to be being found. EONS calls for more EU and national funding in healthcare to support our healthcare systems and improve quality of life for patients across Europe.

22 January 2021
Cancer Survivorship Summit
** ONLINE**
10% discount with code hcuk10eons
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22 February 2021  
Advanced Breast Cancer (ABC) Webinar
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