Establishing a dialogue, finding the right words, facilitating a sick employee's return to work and knowing the legal options available: until June, the NGO Fondation Cancer is organising a series of workshops for managers and HR directors to raise awareness of the best way to deal with cancer in the workplace. This is a major challenge, given that 1.6m people of working age are affected by cancer in Europe. Facilitating these workshops, psychologist and psycho-oncologist Martine Risch from the Fondation Cancer.

In an interview, she explained why it is in companies' interests to take this issue into account. Returning cancer sufferers to work is a subject that is particularly close to her heart. Since 2022, she has also been offering "Back to work" conferences to raise awareness among employees and workshops to advise employers and managers on how to deal with this challenge.

Maëlle Hamma: Why launch this series of workshops for employers?

Martine Risch: At the Cancer Foundation, we've seen from the follow-up work we do with patients that returning to work after illness is often fraught with difficulties. Patients can suffer after-effects and side-effects. Often, when patients return to work, those around them turn the page. But for the patient, getting back into the daily routine and rhythm of work can be much more difficult.

We work with many patients who express fears and apprehensions. They may fear how their colleagues will react, that they won't be up to the job, or even that they will lose their job. What's more, some cancers are becoming more and more like chronic illnesses, forcing patients to reconcile their treatment with their work.

Faced with these challenges, we have also noticed that managers and HR directors are asking themselves many questions.

Why is cancer in the workplace an issue that can no longer be ignored?

Cancer is no longer a disease of the elderly; it is affecting younger and younger people as they enter their active working lives. What's more, thanks to medical advances, cancer is tending to become increasingly chronic, so we have to learn to live with it. When it comes to cancer, we all have a social responsibility. As a team leader, a manager is bound to be faced with an employee's illness at some point.

In Luxembourg, around 3,400 new cases of cancer are diagnosed every year, and for people aged 20-65, the IARC [International Agency for Research on Cancer] reports 1,290 cases. This figure will continue to rise in the coming years.

How difficult can it be for an employer?

The situation is not always easy to manage and is often accompanied by perplexity, which can be even greater in small companies. There can be confusion about existing legal measures, such as internal redeployment or gradual return to work.

In addition to legal measures, other options can be explored, such as greater flexibility in working hours, the possibility of taking time off for medical appointments, or the provision of a rest room. More generally, the complexity may also lie in the way the situation is approached, and not necessarily on the day the patient returns to work.

The question of support can also arise. For example, should an employee be contacted when they are absent for treatment? There's a tendency to say that you shouldn't contact an employee when they're off sick, but on the other hand, many patients have felt neglected and abandoned when this wasn't the case...

One of the challenges of the workshops is also to raise awareness of the right way to communicate.

For a boss or an employee, it's not always easy to find the right words to show support for a sick colleague. What do you recommend?

We have guides on our website [ and ] that can help you find the right words, and those not to say. But I think the worst thing is to say nothing or do nothing at all. Just asking your sick colleague if they need anything or if there's anything you can do to help them is already a good thing. Cancer doesn't just affect the person who is ill, it also affects those around them, including those at work. When a sick person is absent for a long period of time, their colleagues may be perplexed. We are offering a conference that aims to present the experience of a person affected by cancer and give advice on how to cope better with this situation as a colleague.

What advice would you give someone affected by cancer who doesn't know how to reconcile it with their work? Is it compulsory to talk about it?

Here again, we have a number of resources on our website to help . Patients can choose whether or not to talk about their illness. Nothing forces them to do so. It all depends on the working environment and the working relationship with management and colleagues. If there is a relationship of trust, we recommend that you broach the subject, because if you don't, others may not understand the situation. Only by talking openly about it can you generate understanding and empathy. It's a responsibility on both sides.

The next will take place on 18 February, 15 April, 20 May and 17 June. To take part, you need to register in advance with the Cancer Foundation.

Read the original French-language version of this news report /