Transforming blood cancer support

Challenge 

Blood Cancer UK is the UK’s largest blood cancer charity, dedicated to transforming lives through research, support, and advocacy. They provide vital resources, personalised care, and hope to patients and their families, ensuring no one faces a blood cancer diagnosis alone.

In 2023, we partnered with the charity to scale the reach of specialised information and support services in a sustainable and scalable way. The ambition was to partner with haematology departments to refer patients to the charity for ongoing support, with an aim of reaching at least 75% of people diagnosed with blood cancer. Our role was to support the team in reaching this ambition by designing and developing a pilot phase, building user centred design (UCD) capability across the team and bringing our experience from across the sector and healthcare systems.     

Approach

Working as one team with Blood Cancer UK’s internal service transformation team, we began by understanding the current assumptions about a future direct referral and welcome journey service. We also started to develop a plan to gain deeper insights into the viability of these concepts. 

To do this we conducted extensive research, including interviews, surveys, and workshops, to understand the needs and pain points of the blood cancer community and healthcare professionals. We spent significant time with people who had been diagnosed with the disease, understanding more about their support networks, communities and their diagnosis experience. 

This evidence allowed us to start prototyping a new referral service that would integrate into the NHS, meet information governance requirements across multiple NHS Trusts, and be easy to use for referring clinicians and people with blood cancer. 

After several iterations of prototypes, the referral and a newly diagnosed email journey were ready to be built and tested in pilot NHS trusts across the UK. This was accompanied by a monitoring and evaluation plan to understand how successful each pilot was.  

Ensuring Blood Cancer UK was ready to meet new service demand was an important focus. Working as a team, we went through a process of designing and prototyping new operational processes to guarantee the service could manage the number of people being referred. For example, we tested a new callback system. 

Building and embedding new design capabilities

Our goal in capability building is always to develop skills and share our experience in ways that teams will have the confidence and knowledge to be able to work independently in the future. In Blood Cancer UK it was essential that we effectively supported knowledge transfer of our UCD methods. To do this, put in two place supporting activities to support this learning:

1. Informal skills assessments 

We ran informal skills assessments, asking the team to rate their confidence in each of our core UCD methods out of five and provide a brief explanation. This allowed us to tailor our approach and identify which subjects we needed to dive deeper into. 

2. Lunch and Learn sessions 

We ran a series of ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions, featuring 30-minute presentations followed by plenty of time for questions, building understanding and support for UCD across the wider organisation. 

Impact

The new direct referral service is now live in six NHS Trusts. So far, it has provided more than 200 people with blood cancer and their loved ones with the information and support they need after diagnosis. 

The referral process has been embedded into healthcare professionals' processes, being described as the “easiest referral I have to do” and “it’s second nature now”. Healthcare professionals recognise that patients often don’t read the printed information given to them and knowing they are receiving proactive information from Blood Cancer UK is reassuring. Patients are overwhelmingly positive about the service as it leaves them feeling reassured that someone is there if they need support and more informed about their diagnosis. 

After 13 months of working with the Blood Cancer UK team they have built the skills and confidence to continue to lead, deliver and scale this service.

This service is now continuing to scale into more NHS Trusts across the UK and will continue to support more people with blood cancer, in the way that is right for them.