Cancer survivorship and sustainable working life

Together, the cancers pose one of the major health-related threats to the quality of life and thelongevity of working people and also provide a lens through which the healthiness of theiremploying organisations might be viewed. Over the past 20 or so years, advances both in the 189early diagnosis and in the treatment of cancers have meant that surviving the disease is a realpossibility for some. In turn, many working people wish to return to work after treatment whilesome manage to work through that process. As a result, there is an increasing interest inEurope in how we can best manage the impact of cancer diagnosis and treatment, andaftercare, on working life.This paper briefly reviews the current state of knowledge within the framework of the authors’Adaptation – Accommodation Paradigm (Cox et al., 2014) and, in doing so, identifies some ofthe key issues which remain to be resolved (see, for example, Wells et al., 2014). The paperalso outlines the current Programme of Work of the UK-based METIS Collaboration anddescribes how some of its research lines address these issues.