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

We developed a new strategy and have already started working on delivering it. We are proud that its direction was set by our community, and excited by the ambition it contains. To find out more, why not take a deeper look at our strategy?

We have started work on the Blood Cancer Action Plan, which will set out what needs to happen to ensure the UK blood cancer survival rate matches or exceeds the best in the world.

The withdrawal of the ten-year cancer plan by the Westminster Government in January means this is needed now more than ever. We have already established a taskforce of experts, including people affected by blood cancer, who will judge the evidence and make recommendations for change. The report will be published in the first half of 2024.

We invested £5.3m into new research in 2022-2023 and set aside a further £6.3m for additional future research funding. We have started to change the way we fund research, doing more to identify where our investment is likely to have the biggest impact. For example, this year we launched the Matthew Wilson Multiple Myeloma Fund, which will lead to a big increase in our funding of myeloma research.

This year we sent out 36,724 printed health information resources to hospitals and people affected by blood cancer, a 40% increase on the previous year. There were also 1.1 million people who accessed health information via our website, a big increase from the 619,811 people who accessed it the previous year.

We supported fewer people via our support services – the 1,861 people who called or emailed us was lower than the 2,464 people the previous year. The reason for this drop was fewer people came through to our services this year, reflecting the lessening of the immense impact felt by our community through the pandemic.

Due to increased covid-related demand at the start of the year, we were not able to fully develop the new services we wanted to. However, there are a number underway, and we have doubled down on this as a priority in our strategy.

For the first time, we held an in person Walk of Light event in Birmingham, offering participants the chance to come together to walk 2km or 5km in support of friends and family impacted by blood cancer, and we hosted out first Christmas Watch Party, which gave people a chance to watch a Christmas film as a community. The number of people we are in touch with increased, and this helped contribute to us raising £18.7m in 2022-2023, a big increase on last year’s £12.8m.

We have continued to work hard to make our charity a place where people can do their best work, and where high-performing staff want to stay. In our latest staff survey, 98% of staff said they would recommend Blood Cancer UK as a place to work, and 100% are proud of working here.