Why we’re investing in care closer to home

News
Published: 16 September 2026
Macmillan is supporting six new Trailblazer sites to explore different ways of funding and delivering health and care in local communities. Richard Ball, Head of System Investments at Macmillan Cancer Support, explains why we’re investing in this work and what we hope it could mean for people living with cancer. 

Richard Ball Head of System Investments, Macmillan Cancer Support

Creating more opportunities to invest in better care

Across the country, local health and care teams have ambitious ideas about how they could better support the people and communities they serve. 

That might mean helping people get support earlier, bringing more care closer to home, or making it easier for different services to work together around what someone needs. 

Turning those ideas into reality takes investment. And some of the changes that could make the biggest difference need funding upfront, while their benefits, for people, communities and the health system, may take longer to emerge. 

I’ve spent more than a decade working with NHS, community, and voluntary sector partners to develop new ways of improving outcomes for people.  What I’ve learned is that lasting change rarely comes from a single organisation acting alone.  It comes from bringing the right people around a common purpose and creating the conditions for them to do things differently.  The Trailblazer programme gives us an opportunity to do both.  

That’s where we think Macmillan can play an important role. Through the Trailblazer programme, we want to help local partners come together around a shared ambition to improve outcomes for people and communities.  Investment is part of that, but so is creating the space to build new partnerships, and think differently about how services could work for their communities.

Giving local areas more freedom to do things differently

Six areas across England have now been chosen as Trailblazers. Over the next seven months, they will develop new approaches to providing more connected, personalised care closer to home. 

The six Trailblazers are:
  • Bristol NHS Foundation Trust
  • Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust and the Royal Borough of Greenwich
  • Navigo Health & Social Care CIC (North East Lincolnshire)
  • RM Partners NHS Cancer Alliance (North Central, North West and South West London)
  • Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust
  • York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. 

There won’t be one model that every area has to follow. That is important. 

Every community is different.The services already available, the challenges people face, and the things that would make the biggest difference will vary from place to place. 

We want local organisations and communities to have more freedom to look at what people in their area need, bring the right partners together, and decide how best to respond. 

For some places, that might mean supporting people with complex health and social needs. For others, it could mean moving more care out of hospital or strengthening support available in the community.

 

Investing now to create better care in the future

At Macmillan, we’ve committed to investing £250 million in Neighbourhood Health across the UK over the next three to five years. 

For us, this is about using our money and expertise to create the right conditions for change. By providing time, capacity, and investment upfront, we can help local partners think differently about the outcomes they want to achieve and how they can work together to achieve these. Importantly, investment is not the goal itself. It is a means of giving local partners the space to develop new ideas, strengthen partnerships and test approaches that could lead to better outcomes for people and communities. 

The Trailblazer programme builds on work already underway in West Hertfordshire, where Macmillan, Social Finance and West Hertfordshire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust have developed a new approach to funding care. 

The funding approach is relatively simple: Social Investment can provide the upfront funding, time and capacity needed to develop new approaches to care, rather than asking already stretched local services to find that money themselves. If the approach delivers agreed outcomes for people, that investment can then be repaid. 

This creates the space for local partners to work together, explore new ideas, and put in place changes that could improve people’s health and care in the future. 

Macmillan intends to be an early investor in the Trailblazer areas once this development work is complete. But we don’t want to do this alone. Part of our role is to demonstrate what is possible, bring together partners around a shared vision, and help create the conditions for other organisations and investors to put their money behind approaches that improve people’s health.

This is about more than six places

These six areas are Trailblazers for a reason. We want to learn from what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to change along the way. And, importantly, we want the learnings to be useful well beyond the six sites taking part. 

Our ambition is to help show how investment can give local areas more freedom to build care around the people and communities they serve, rather than expecting people to navigate a system that wasn’t designed around their lives. 

That is why Macmillan is investing in this work; not just to support these six areas to do something differently, but to help create a model that could improve care for many more people in the future. 

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