Protecting healthcare workers from hazardous medicinal products
Every year, more than 12 million healthcare workers across Europe are potentially exposed to hazardous medicinal products, which are drugs mainly used in cancer treatment and other therapies. While these drugs are potentially life saving for patients, they can cause serious harm to those who prepare, administer, or dispose of them.
Despite the scale of the risk, protection has historically been fragmented: guidance has tended to follow individual chemical classifications rather than the shared handling workflows that actually put staff at risk, leaving nurses, pharmacists, and support staff covered unevenly across the EU.
Jefferson Communications manages the strategy for a European advocacy network campaigning for stronger, binding EU-level protections for these workers, principally through an EU directive covering occupational exposure to hazardous substances.
We run this campaign's policy, communications, and coalition-building strategy end to end. That has meant building and sustaining a network of partners, including leading European healthcare unions and professional nursing associations, capable of speaking with one voice at critical legislative moments.
It has also meant generating an evidence base robust enough to make the case impossible to ignore: commissioning and publishing a landmark national survey of over 1,000 oncology nurses in partnership with Germany's leading oncology nursing organisation, which uncovered striking gaps in access to protective equipment and occupational health monitoring.
We have translated that evidence into direct advocacy, briefing policymakers and officials, presenting to European Parliament committees, and coordinating joint statements with partner organisations at each stage of the legislative negotiation.
Central to this has been a distinct policy argument: that lasting protection depends on bringing actual handling practices into legal scope, rather than relying on definitions alone.
The campaign has delivered sustained, visible results. A strategic EU report, shaped by consistent advocacy, explicitly linked workforce protection to the relevant EU directive and recognised exposure to hazardous medicinal products as a factor compounding Europe's wider healthcare workforce pressures.
While the most recent round of legislative negotiation did not secure every protection sought, the network and its coalition partners issued a joint statement reframing that outcome as the foundation for the next stage of advocacy, keeping the issue firmly on the table rather than letting momentum stall.
The national survey findings have since been published in a peer-reviewed global medical journal and presented at a major international oncology congress, giving the campaign an evidence base that extends its credibility well beyond Brussels.
A parallel programme is now underway with a sister organisation in the UK, including a parliamentary roundtable, a roundtable debate, and a clinician-led consensus paper, extending the model to a new market.
Through sustained, evidence-led advocacy, Jefferson Communications has helped turn occupational exposure to hazardous medicinal products from a siloed hazard into a recognised EU policy priority, with the campaign for stronger protection continuing into its next phase.
MORE CASE STUDIES
