Cancer Nursing

The nature of cancer care is changing as new treatments improve survival rates. However, cancer remains a devastating disease and patients need both skilled clinical care and intensive support while receiving treatment, and increasingly, in managing the long-term effects of the disease after treatment. Nurses are the linchpin of the cancer care team, able to coordinate care and ensure patients receive timely diagnosis and treatment. They are also the professional’s patients are likely to turn to for emotional and practical support, and need to be able to offer this in a compassionate manner and adapt it to individual patients’ needs.

This award is open to individual nurses or teams from the NHS or independent sector who have improved the quality of care patients receive during diagnosis and treatment, or care and support for cancer survivors or those in remission.

Examples might include initiatives to:

• Streamline care pathways to reduce waiting times for diagnosis or treatment
• Extend the scope of nursing practice in order to improve patient or survivor care
• Address practical or emotional issues faced by patients with or surviving cancer

Each entry will be judged against the following criteria:

• Innovation: originality of the idea
• Value: impact of the initiative on patient care and/or service effectiveness
• Patient focus: evidence that patient/service user need was central to the work
• Collaboration: evidence of the involvement of other professionals, services and/or patients in the project
• Clinical effectiveness: data demonstrating how this initiative drives clinical enhancements
• Leadership: evidence of entrants championing their innovation in their organisation or more widely
• Adaptability: ideas that could be adapted for use elsewhere in entrants’ organisations or other organisations
• Sustainability: initiatives that can be embedded within organisations to operate without the input of the people who developed them