Support services and increasing awareness

We expanded our blood cancer information this year to help more people, especially those from disadvantaged groups. We created health information in five community languages and developed new resources like:

• Information about infection risks, including a printed card people can carry to help them stay safe.
• New information about specific types of blood cancer, so people can find what they need when they need it most.
• A new 'Black with blood cancer' web page.

As always, people affected by blood cancer helped us create all these materials. This made sure they were honest, relevant and truly helpful.

Our specialist nurses
Our specialist nurses supported 1,825 people this year – 14% more than last year. We answered 79% of calls on the first try, so more people got help straightaway. Through our new phone interpreting service, people can now get nurse support in over 170 languages.

Online Forum
Our online community forum grew, with 1,665 new members joining. We now have 5,618 people in total – a 50% increase from last year.

Clinical Trials Support Service
We expanded our Clinical Trials Support Service. The team helped 177 people look for clinical trials and found suitable options for 86 of them. We worked with patients and doctors to explore how we could offer this service to even more people in future.

Access to Clinical Trials
We started an important project with Black and Pakistani communities to understand their experience with clinical trials. These groups have higher risks for certain blood cancers but are less likely to join trials. We're learning why this happens and what we can do to tackle this inequality. We're grateful to the people who shared their experiences and gave us valuable ideas about making trials fairer. We're now planning the next steps together.

Online training
1,192 people completed our online training course for new blood cancer care staff. 85% said it helped them do their job better. We're now looking at creating more training to help nurses improve care for blood cancer patients.

Direct Referral scheme
We know too many people with blood cancer don't know about our support. So we started working on our Direct Referral scheme. In the first year, we had 349 new referrals with excellent feedback. The pilot showed people not only used our support and information, but felt more confident understanding their diagnosis and finding help. Because of this success, the service now runs in 12 hospital trusts across the UK.

We generated attention at important times throughout the year, sharing key messages across channels for maximum impact. We especially focused on reaching people affected by blood cancer who could benefit from joining our community.

More people now recognise Blood Cancer UK, with awareness averaging 50% across the year compared to 45% last year, peaking at 52% in September 2024.

We used the Blood Cancer Action Plan launch to test new ways of reaching people. This created powerful campaign materials we can keep using. We got national and regional coverage on TV, radio and in newspapers, highlighting the UK's poor blood cancer survival rates and our solutions.

The launch also boosted our social media engagement and brought record website visits, with hundreds of people using our tool to write to their local representatives.

We couldn’t make an impact without stories. So we're grateful to the members of our community who volunteer to share their experiences. In 2024-2025, community representatives helped to shape the Blood Cancer Action Plan, using their lived experience of blood cancer.

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