Every Person with Cancer Deserves a Nurse with Time to Care

 

By Dr Wendy McInally - President, European Oncology Nursing Society

Some of the most important moments in cancer care never appear in a patient’s medical record. They are the conversations that ease anxiety, the explanations that build understanding and the reassurance that helps someone face what comes next. The work of cancer nurses makes these moments possible. Across Europe, however, the time they require is becoming harder to protect.

Cancer nurses do far more than deliver treatment. We assess, plan, implement and evaluate. This is specialist work, built through education and training, research and clinical experience

Cancer services are now caring for more people with increasingly complex needs while struggling to recruit and retain specialist professionals. Vacancies remain unfilled, experienced nurses leave faster than they can be replaced, and those who remain carry greater responsibility. This is how Europe’s cancer workforce crisis reaches the bedside: not simply as an empty post, but as more patients for each nurse, fewer opportunities to anticipate complications and less capacity to provide the person-centred care on which cancer nursing is built.

For nurses, the consequence is more than exhaustion. It is knowing what good care requires but not always having the staffing, resources or time to provide it. That scarcity can cause and worsen moral distress, contributing to burnout and pushing more experienced professionals away from cancer care.

Patients feel pressure from the other side. A hurried explanation can leave someone uncertain about managing side effects. Reduced continuity may mean subtle changes are recognised later. Less time for education, training, research, coordination and supportive care can make an already difficult cancer journey harder to navigate.

When experienced cancer nurses leave, health systems lose capacity, but also specialist knowledge, judgement and relationships that cannot be restored simply by filling a vacancy. The impact is measurable. The European Cancer Nursing Index (ECNI) 2022 found that almost one in five participating nurses reported treatment delays caused by staff shortages. Each additional patient allocated to a nurse was associated with a 9% increase in the likelihood of a reported delay.

Cancer nurses are not facing these pressures alone. Across oncology, physicians, pharmacists, radiographers, pathologists and many other professionals are working under similar strain. The 2024 European Cancer Organisation’s Under Pressure report, to which EONS contributed, found that more than half of cancer professionals described their workload as endless and over three-quarters regularly worked overtime. Yet four in five still felt proud of the care they provided.

That commitment is one of cancer care’s greatest strengths. But it should never become how health systems compensate for chronic understaffing.

So, what’s the European Union prepared to do about it?

The European Parliament’s forthcoming vote on the health workforce crisis offers an opportunity to begin answering that question. Its focus on workforce planning, fair employment conditions, mental-health support, education, training and safe staffing reflects realities that cancer nurses have raised for years. The true measure of that ambition will be whether it changes daily practice for professionals and the people who depend on them.

For cancer nursing, action must mean staffing based on patient need and safety, sustained investment in specialist education and career pathways, and working environments that enable experienced nurses to remain in the profession. It must also mean reducing avoidable administrative pressure, so that digital systems and organisational processes return time to care rather than taking more of it away.

Europe’s cancer ambitions depend on new knowledge, better treatments and earlier diagnosis. But progress reaches the point of delivery only when skilled professionals have the time, education, training and conditions to turn it into care.

Protecting that time is not only a workforce policy. It is an essential investment in safe, compassionate and equitable cancer care.