Macmillan Lived Experience programme round up 2023

Our Macmillan-funded Lived Experience Programme to amplify the voices of people affected by cancer concluded in December 2023.

We continued to support four people affected by cancer to serve on the national Transforming Cancer Care (TCC) Executive and Delivery Groups. We facilitated pre-meets between them and Macmillan Cancer Support leads, supported their attendance at TCC meetings and other events, organised and facilitated ad-hoc meetings for them with key stakeholders, and offered individual and collective peer support.

We have also continued to work closely with the Macmillan Engagement Team in Scotland to support service user involvement throughout Macmillan’s national roll-out of their Improving the Cancer Journey (ICJ) services.

Our Peer Evaluator project continued at pace throughout 2023. Peer evaluators are people affected by cancer who volunteer alongside us to co-design, co-deliver and help us analyse insights gathered from focus groups, interviews and surveys that help us better understand the needs of people affected by cancer who traditionally experience health inequalities, additional challenges or barriers when accessing cancer services.

In early 2023 we recruited and supported a new team of Peer Evaluators to conduct engagement with people affected by cancer and rurality and deprivation in North West Dumfries and Wigtownshire. We shared our findings with the Dumfries and Galloway Improving the Cancer Journey Service in August to inform their service development, prior to their new ICJ service officially launching in November 2023.

In Summer, we concluded several months of targeted engagement in partnership with our national Peer Evaluator volunteers. In October, we published our final insights report to share our national findings, including insights from our targeted engagement with people affected by cancer and visual impairment and people affected from cancer from minority ethnic communities. Throughout late 2023 our focus has been to share those findings widely.

With the support of our Peer Evaluator who led on engagement with people affected by cancer and visual impairment, and the ALLIANCE Digital Manager, we developed a short film to highlight some of the issues raised by people affected by visual impairment, but, more importantly, to share some simple steps that can be taken by health care and other professionals to improve people’s experiences.

We also worked closely with Wigtownshire Women and Cancer to develop an ALLIANCE Live film to highlight the challenges for people affected by cancer living within rural communities in Dumfries and Galloway.

We concluded our programme with a celebration event in Stirling on 29 November 2023 to showcase the impact that the voices of people affected by cancer have had on the Transforming Cancer Care Programme. The TCC Programme was a strategic partnership between Macmillan Cancer Support and Scottish Government, with their formal governance structures also ending in December 2023. But their partnership continues via the new Scottish Government Cancer Strategic Board, who will work with multiple partners to oversee delivery of the new Cancer Strategy and Action Plan, published in June 2023.

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