The EFN participated in the EU-OSHA event “Occupational Safety and Health in Europe’s Health and Social Sector: Key Findings and Policy Insights”, in Bilbao. The event highlighted the complex Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) challenges faced by nurses and allied healthcare professionals and explored possible solutions.
Over the two days, the EFN highlighted the importance of developing EU-legislation on Safe Staffing Levels, with nurse-to-patient ratios, across all healthcare settings, in order to address these challenges. Importantly, this position is supported by the European Parliament, which called in its INI Report on the Health Workforce to recognise Unsafe Staffing Levels as an occupational hazard, and therefore called on the European Commission to develop an obligatory framework to address this.
Moreover, the EFN took this opportunity to present the KEEPCARING Project, which brings together research institutions, clinical partners, technology developers, and end-users representatives, like EFN, to design, test, and evaluate research and evidence-based interventions that strengthen workforce resilience in hospital settings. Importantly, the KEEPCARING Project is working towards developing evidence-based interventions to address individual, team, and organizational stressors, and thus improve the wellbeing and resilience of frontline healthcare professionals. EFN looks forward to its continued collaboration with EU-OSHA to achieve concrete frontline impact, including through the EU-OSHA Healthy Workplaces Campaign 2026-2028, of which EFN is a member of.