Building the foundations

We said goodbye to our chief executive, Gemma Peters, who left us to become the chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Support. Following an objective process where we interviewed a strong group of candidates involving both internal and external candidates, we appointed Helen Rowntree, our director of research, services and engagement, as our new chief executive.

We believe Helen’s appointment sends a strong signal about the high quality of our staff and the importance we place on developing our staff’s careers.

We have started looking at how we build our digital skills and ensure we are making the best use of data to inform our decisions. And while one of our greatest strengths is the extent to which our community is involved in our decision-making, we want to go further, and make sure the people we are involving are genuinely representative of the blood cancer community.

We are proud that our latest staff survey shows that 98% of our staff say they would recommend Blood Cancer UK as a place to work, and 100% are proud to say they work here. We made progress on making Blood Cancer UK a more inclusive place to work, which is crucial for ensuring we become more representative of the blood cancer community as a whole.

Over the last year, we have rolled out a series of training sessions and a mentoring scheme with Disability Connect to help ensure we are supporting members of staff with disabilities.

We also put on sessions about menstruation and started providing free period products in our offices.

Lastly, we hosted a learning session with a guest speaker from ACLT (African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust) to help improve our staff’s understanding of the experience of people from ethnic minority groups.