We can’t keep patching cancer care: how the Trailblazer Programme is driving system change

For years, there has been broad agreement across healthcare that more care should happen closer to home.

Yet despite this ambition, too many people living with cancer still experience a system that is fragmented, difficult to navigate and too often unable to meet the realities of their lives.

People across the UK are juggling multiple appointments across disconnected services, repeating their stories, and struggling to access emotional, practical or financial support alongside treatment.

Many are trying to navigate complex systems at a time when they are least able to do so.

And for people already facing barriers because of poverty, racism, disability, geography or other forms of inequity, those challenges are even greater.

The truth is that the current system was not designed around people’s lives. It was designed around institutions, pathways, and conditions.

At Macmillan, we believe there is a better way.

Neighbourhood health is an opportunity to move beyond simply managing pressure across healthcare systems.

It is about rethinking how care is designed, delivered and experienced, so people can access more joined-up support closer to where they live.

For us at Macmillan, this is not just about shifting services out of hospitals. It is about building joined-up, person-centred support around the realities of people’s lives.

It means:

• Clinical and non-clinical care working together.
• Health services collaborating with community organisations and local partners.
• Designing solutions with communities themselves, particularly in areas experiencing the worst outcomes.
• Focusing on long-term transformation rather than short-term fixes.
• Exploring how social investment and outcomes-based approaches can help unlock change.

The new Trailblazer Programme partnership between us, West Herts and Social Finance is an important step in that direction.

By supporting neighbourhoods to build the capability, partnerships and infrastructure needed for community-based care, the programme has the potential to help local systems create models that are:

• Preventative.
• Scalable.
• Built around people’s wider needs, including practical, emotional and financial support.

More importantly, it also recognises that meaningful transformation cannot be created from the top down.

Sustainable change happens when local communities, health services, and voluntary organisations work together to shape solutions that reflect their local realities.

At Macmillan, our ambition in this space is significant. Over the next three to five years, we intend to invest £250 million into neighbourhood health across the UK.

But our role is not simply to provide funding. We want to act as a partner and supporter, helping to create the conditions for change.

We bring decades of experience in personalised cancer care. We bring trusted relationships across health systems and communities. We bring insight from working with people living with cancer. And increasingly, we want to help create the conditions that allow local systems to test, learn and sustain new approaches.

Moving beyond short-term fixes

But if we are serious about creating a more equitable, more effective and more sustainable future for cancer care, then we must stop simply patching gaps in the current system.

We need to and start redesigning the system itself. That is the opportunity in front of us now, and Macmillan is committed to helping deliver it, together with communities, partners and people living with cancer.