How we’ve delivered on what we said we’d do last year

Last year, we set out six key things we wanted to achieve in 2020/21. Here’s how we got on.

We still funded £3.8 million of new blood cancer research, despite the drop in our income. This includes research to manipulate T-cells to make them better able to destroy myeloma cells, and a project that could lead to better treatments for people with chronic myeloid leukaemia.

We planned to publish our research strategy in early 2021, but we delayed the launch of this because we wanted to make sure it was relevant to a post-COVID-19 world and so needed to take more time to understand what this would look like. We published this in June 2021.

We saw a huge and unprecedented increase in our support services, and at times demand for our services was 10 times higher than normal. Despite this level of demand, we changed the way we worked to make sure we responded to every person who needed our support.

The reach of our online health information increased from 1 million page views to 1.4 million page views over the course of 2020/21, largely because of interest in our COVID-19 information. But the number of printed publications we sent out fell compared to the previous year, as fewer patients went into hospital during the pandemic.

We campaigned on behalf of people with blood cancer so they were supported through shielding, with priority supermarket deliveries, pharmacy support, sick pay and furlough for people in employment. We have raised the concerns of people with blood cancer in meetings with ministers, shadow ministers, the Mayor of London, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, the Mayor of Merseyside, civil servants and many others from across the four nations.

We successfully campaigned for people with blood cancer be to made a higher priority for the vaccine, and for the adults they live with to be prioritised.

The £10.0 million we fundraised was lower than the £13.0 million we raised in 2019/20, but was much more than we expected given how many fundraising events were cancelled because of COVID-19. We achieved this by moving much of our fundraising online, giving more focus to raising money from trusts and foundations, and launching our new Walk of Light event, which saw 1,300 people raise almost £500,000.

We have continued to prioritise work to ensure we are able to support and represent all people with blood cancer, whatever their background. This has included commissioning the University of Bath to do research into the barriers black, Asian and other minority ethnic patients with blood cancer face in accessing clinical trials. Also, with partners in the Blood Cancer Alliance, we have commissioned a report into racial inequalities in blood cancer, focused on access to care and treatment.

We have also reviewed our research funding processes with a focus on equality and diversity. We changed our recruitment process to remove barriers, including introducing blind shortlisting and giving questions to candidates in advance.

We have successfully recruited new Trustees to our Board using this approach and are delighted that the Board now better reflects the community we serve. We have involved staff across the organisation in redeveloping our equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. We have also developed an equality, diversity and inclusion framework and action plan so that staff understand what they need to do to make our charity more inclusive.