The headline results from our survey ‘How can we beat blood cancer in this generation?’

We had more than 700 people respond to our survey – these people ranged in experience and connection to Blood Cancer UK. They included researchers and healthcare professional.

Most people who responded (about 75%) have been involved with, supported or aware of us in the last 5 years.

While we’re thrilled we reached such a high number of people with this survey, we know that there are many more people in our community that we aren’t reaching, and people who don’t know about us that we need to speak to. We’ll continue to try and seek the views of as many people as possible.

The survey really reinforced that the word “beating” means different things to different people. For most of you, it means either curing blood cancer or developing new treatments to improve the survival rate and reduce side-effects. But there were also many of you who think emotional support, early diagnosis and raising awareness among health professionals and the public was also key. The first part of our strategy developments is now looking at this question, and we’ll have more to share soon.

There were lots of different views on this – themes that emerged included COVID, raising awareness, new and accessible treatments that support patients’ quality of life, mental health and early diagnosis.

Not surprising, our role in research was the biggest area that people thought we needed to focus on to make a difference. There were also significant comments about more work being done to increase pressure on the government to work with the charity and help raise awareness of blood cancer and educating the public more on blood cancer symptoms and treatment.

The majority of people did not have anything they wanted us to stop. But some comments included, from people who thought we were focused too much on COVID information and support, who thought we should work more closely with other relevant charities and do more to avoid duplication of services by NHS or other charities. Some people thought we should be doing more to raise awareness, particularly through having a bigger media profile.

You can read more about why we're doing this piece of work here. Please get in touch with [email protected] if you have any comments, feedback or would like to be involved.

We’ll be blogging again soon, when we’ll go into more detail about the survey results and give an update on our discussion on how we define what “beating” blood cancer means for us.