• Research projects
• Breast cancer
• Neutropenia
• Prostate cancer

Providing Supportive Care and Advice to Men with Prostate Cancer: An Education Project

EONS, in collaboration with EAUN, ECCO and Amgen, are engaged in a project to address the training needs of nurses and doctors working in prostate cancer across Europe.

The task force for the project includes representatives from all the partner organisations, including Danny Kelly, Project Lead, Francoise Charnay-Sonnek, Professor Sara Faithfull, Kay Leonard, Bente Thoft Jensen, Louis Denis.

The initial phase of the project is to survey nurses' and young oncologists' working practices, skills, knowledge and training needs, and to compare and collate these with patient reports of what support they feel they need and how this is currently being met. A comprehensive and tailored education package for nurses and young oncologists working in prostate cancer will then be developed for dissemination across European countries. The project started in October 2008 and is planned to be complete by the end of 2010.

Nurses, young oncologists and patients are being researched separately via on-line surveys individually designed for each group and targeted across seven countries. The conduct of this research is being undertaken jointly by Middlesex University and the University of Surrey in the UK, and the questionnaire and data entry are being managed by Virtual Surveys Limited, an independent market research company.

Data collection for the nurses' survey has now been successfully completed and we would like to thank all those who visited the EONS website in June 2009 and completed the on-line questionnaire. The response rate we received was excellent. We had planned for 50 completed questionnaires in each country. In the event we achieved 472 responses: 60 in Denmark; 51 in France; 57 in Ireland; 58 in the Netherlands; 55 in Spain; 52 in Turkey; 112 in the UK and 27 in a spread of other countries.

This success is due to the efforts and encouragement of our many contacts across the nursing societies and networks in each country, as well as the nurses who took the time to complete the on-line questionnaire.

The data from the survey is now being analysed and top-line results so far are giving us very useful guidance for developing the two further on-line surveys. The next survey, amongst young oncologists, is planned for late summer 2009 across the same seven countries. The data from that stage, together with the nurse data, will be used to develop the patient survey, which is planned for spring 2010, again across the same countries.

Once again, EONS, EAUN and their other collaborators would like to thank everybody who has helped make this nurse survey a success, and we look forward to sharing our results with you. These will be available in an edited form on the EONS Website and in the EONS Newsletter later in the year. We also plan to publish papers based on data from all the stages in peer-reviewed journals and share the findings at ECCO 15 and other conferences.