Posts by tag
policy
Developing palliative care: new WHO guidance helps countries tailor their own path
Image: Delivering palliative care in Kerala, India ©Camilla Perkins, camillaperkins.com Delivering palliative care to avoid unnecessary health-related suffering is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “a moral imperative and a human right”. Yet only a tiny proportion of…
How we turn lung cancer care into a European success story
Opportunities to make significant headway against cancer don’t come around very often. This year, an alignment of science and European cancer policy is opening such an opportunity in relation to lung cancer ‒ Europe’s single biggest cancer killer. Speaking as…
Informal carers play a key role in cancer care: they need and deserve more support
What is it worth to patients to have someone they can rely on to provide emotional support and talk things through, help them get to and from appointments, remind them about what medicines to take and when, help them eat…
Preventing alcohol-related cancers in Europe: lessons from three countries
Alcohol can be bad for your health. Most people know that. But what many people have yet to grasp is that ‒ like smoking tobacco ‒ drinking alcohol can significantly raise their risk of developing and dying from a wide…
PSA population screening is back in favour: here’s why
Five years ago, the idea of national screening programmes for prostate cancer had gone cold. The benefits of PSA (prostate specific antigen) blood testing, introduced as a screening tool in the 1980s, had long been fiercely debated. But by 2015…
Beating cancer is complex – our messaging must be clear
A window of opportunity is opening up across Europe to reverse the ever-rising trend of new cancers and improve outcomes for patients everywhere. It’s been brought about in part by a major shift in favour of Europe taking on a…
Roundtable ‘grasps nettle’ on European cancer inequalities
Improving treatment of older patients and closing the East−West divide were the focus of a Community 365 Roundtable on Inequalities organised by the European Cancer Organisation on the 14th October. This event was the first of a series of Community…
Stella Kyriakides: EU Commissioner for Health
When Stella Kyriakides took on the post of EU Health Commissioner in September 2019, Europe’s cancer community knew they could trust her to fight their cause. Within months she was launching a public consultation on Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan. Then…
On a mission to beat cancer
One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind – the words Neil Armstrong pronounced as he completed humankind’s first mission to the moon, will – if the European Commission gets its way – soon be pronounced for other…