On 14 May 2026, as part of All.Can International’s participation in the CUMO Congress in Budva, Madalina Iamandei moderated the CURTAIN project’s workshop on cancer literacy, held on the same evening as the 4P-CAN roundtable. The session, titled ‘Strengthening Cancer Literacy Through Collaborative Capacity Building‘, brought together researchers and practitioners from Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Montenegro and North Macedonia for an evening of structured knowledge exchange.
Cancer literacy — the capacity of citizens, patients and healthcare professionals to access, understand and act on reliable health information — is one of the least uniformly developed dimensions of cancer care across Europe. A significant gap persists between Western and Eastern European countries, between urban and rural populations, and across different socioeconomic groups. Addressing that gap is a condition for closing the wider inequalities in cancer outcomes that Europe has been working to eliminate for more than a decade.
The workshop featured seven presentations offering national perspectives on cancer literacy policy, health communication and the barriers facing different population groups. Each presenter offered not only an account of the current situation in their country but also identified transferable good practices that could inform the broader CURTAIN project. The presentations were followed by facilitated discussion, with Madalina drawing out cross-cutting themes and connecting national experience to the shared evidence base the project is building, as well as the European perspective on the topic.
Several themes emerged consistently across the presentations: the critical role of trust in health information sources; the uneven capacity of healthcare organisations to support patient understanding; and the particular challenges facing vulnerable groups including rural communities, older adults, migrants and Roma populations. These insights will feed directly into the CURTAIN project’s next phase of deliverable development, including the Cancer Literacy Score measurement tool and the Virtual Cancer Literacy Library.
CURTAIN — Beating Cancer Inequalities through Literacy in Europe — is co-funded by the EU4Health programme and brings together fifteen partners from nine European countries. Its ambition is to develop and validate the first cancer-specific tool dedicated to measuring cancer literacy across seven consortium countries, building the evidence base and practical resources that can support a Europe-wide improvement in health literacy for cancer prevention and care. All.Can International is a consortium partner, contributing its multi-stakeholder convening expertise and its connections to policy communities at national and European level.
The CUMO Congress provided a valuable setting for this work: bringing together oncologists, health authorities, civil society representatives and EU project partners in one place created the kind of interdisciplinary conversation that rarely happens in formal academic or policy settings alone. All.Can International is grateful to CUMO and to all the researchers and practitioners who contributed to the events in Budva.
About CURTAIN
CURTAIN is co-funded by the EU4Health programme. It brings together fifteen partners from Bulgaria, Italy, Moldova, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania and Ukraine, coordinated by the Centre for Innovation in Medicine (Romania). Learn more at curtainproject.eu.