WE ARE A COALITION OF CHARITIES REPRESENTING PEOPLE LIVING WITH BLOOD CANCER

There are around 240,000 people living with blood cancer in the UK.

Together, blood cancers are the fifth most common type of adult cancer, the most common cancer amongst children and the third most fatal cancer. Together, they claim more lives every year than breast or prostate cancer, however they remain widely unknown. Those living with one of these cancers face unique challenges whilst undergoing diagnosis, treatment and on-going care.

The Blood Cancer Alliance is a group of fifteen UK charities. Together, we are working to tackle the issues blood cancer patients face, and improve the experience and outcomes of all those living with blood cancer.

We believe that effective engagement with policy makers is vital if we are to achieve that goal. To this end as an Alliance we are challenging policymakers to help enact our six calls to action:

• Adopt improved mechanisms by which blood cancer patients’ needs can be factored into treatment appraisal processes, alongside better use of real-world clinical data.

• Improve and expedite appraisal processes to ensure patients can access new and life-saving treatments as quickly as possible.

• Create an overarching access policy in each UK health administration, which demonstrates commitment to delivering timely access to emerging new drugs and advanced therapies.

• Close the diagnosis gap by delivering specific strategies for blood cancer as part of the NHS plans across the UK.

• Incentivise a focus on blood cancer outcomes by ensuring each health administration in the UK measures and reports blood cancer data, and does so in terms of a single patient cohort before breaking down data by individual types of blood cancer.

• Future provision of emotional, mental health and psychological support for people diagnosed with cancer must take account of the specific and complex needs of people with blood cancer.

BLOOD CANCER DASHBOARD

The Blood Cancer Dashboard is now live here.

The Blood Cancer Dashboard has been developed in collaboration between Janssen and the Blood Cancer Alliance, to help underpin service improvement in blood cancer and achieve the aims set out in the NHS England (NHSE) Long Term Plan. It brings together existing blood cancer (haematological cancer) data and allows the user to make comparisons with the data on the four most common cancers included in the existing NHSE and Public Health England (PHE) dashboard, as well between Cancer Alliances. This data is provided at national (England), Cancer Alliance and NHS Trust (waiting times) level across seven key domains:

• Incidence

• Mortality

• Prevalence

• Route to diagnosis

• Time to diagnosis

• Waiting time

• Survival

The data included in the dashboard will be monitored on an ongoing basis and updated to reflect new data releases.