Contributing to new challenges in nursing care in the EAUN Board

My name is Tiago Santos, I am 28 years old and I graduated in 2012 at the Nursing School of Lisbon. I started my career as a registered nurse in a nursing home where I mainly worked in a rehabilitation ward.

In 2014, I embraced a new career project and started to work in the Urology Department at Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, a reference cancer centre in Portugal, as the responsible nurse for the outpatient urology clinic. This was a huge challenge for me because I was the first nurse specifically dedicated to developing the urology outpatient department. I became increasingly motivated over the years, because I had the opportunity to implement a lot of projects and see the positive impact they had on patient recovery and quality of life.

The main urological surgeries performed in our department are robot-assisted radical prostatectomies. My main work starts at the time of the diagnostic exams, then I prepare the patient for surgery, promoting an early start of the rehabilitation process and, after surgery, I continue the rehabilitation process with major emphasis on recovery of urinary continence and sexual function. Therefore, and because of my special interest in urological patient rehabilitation, I finished my Master degree and specialisation in Rehabilitation Nursing in 2018. Since 2015 I have been a member of the EAUN and in 2016 I joined the panel for updating the EAUN guideline on TRUS biopsy which was presented this year at the Annual Meeting in Barcelona (ES). It has been a great experience to be part of this panel since it allows me to contribute to updating nursing knowledge about this topic.

In 2019, I joined a group of Portuguese nurses who started a scientific online nursing journal. The first edition was published in January and I am currently one of the reviewers. In my opinion, now is the right time to join the EAUN board because new challenges of nursing care are emerging due to the quick advance of technology in health systems. I am very motivated to contribute in order to maintain the connection between nursing practice and state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, I hope to contribute with the perspective of a nurse working in a country where the urology nursing career is not as developed as in some European countries.

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Tiago Santos, RN, MScN, Rehab.Nurs. Champalimaud Foundation, Prostate Unit, Lisbon, Portugal, t.santos@eaun.org