Now, more than ever, timing is right for oncology nurses to champion, co-design, and promote value-based and strengths-based cancer care!

Oncology nursing was an early adopter of person-centred care (PCC)—broadly defined as a respectful, responsive, and tailored approach to healthcare that strives to consider peoples’ needs, values, and preferences (Loiselle et al., 2019). PCC is established as a central aim for any comprehensive cancer care centre, with the onus now on the continued promotion of upstream approaches. Upstream, also called bottom-up approaches address, from a user perspective, individual, social, and economic factors that may act as barriers to care.

In this editorial, I argue that nurses ought to take stock of emergent and promising upstream approaches that tackle care access, blending and tailoring these approaches for optimal impact, while documenting what works and what does not. A call to action is most urgent considering the dramatic surge in healthcare demands stemming from changing demographics, new treatment modalities and increased survival, as well as COVID-related disruptions and backlogs. Herein, I identify three emerging movements, including value-based health care (VBHC), strengths-based nursing and health care (SBNH), and co-design, discussing how these readily can be integrated to address multifaceted cancer care issues, such as those from the perspectives of patients and their families.