The Macmillan Living With and Beyond Cancer (LWABC) Programme in South Yorkshire, Bassetlaw and North Derbyshire was aimed to ensure an equitable provision of services for people living with and beyond cancer in seven localities: Barnsley, Bassetlaw, Doncaster,  North Derbyshire & Hardwick, Rotherham, Sheffield, and Wakefield. The programme was approved in 2015, began implementation in mid-2017 and ended in March 2021.

About

The Living With and Beyond programme was a partnership with Macmillan Cancer Support to help improve the experience of people living with and beyond cancer in our region.

The programme specifically focused on breast, bowel and prostate cancer services with the aim to ensure everyone diagnosed with these cancers can live well after a diagnosis. This means:

• Getting care in a way and place that works for you
• Care and support designed around you and those close to you
• Support to manage your recovery yourself

If you have any questions about the South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Living With and Beyond programme please email: richard.metcalfe1@nhs.net 

Approach

The programme took a structured approach, and supported the local implementation of several components of personalised care and support in each of the localities, across breast, colorectal and prostate tumour sites.

These components were:  

• Meaningful conversations, using the holistic needs assessment (HNA) as a framework
• New support worker roles, to enable the delivery of other components of the programme and to design new care models and support services
• Health and wellbeing activities to support patients to self-manage after treatment
• Summary documents to clearly communicate patients’ diagnosis, treatment, and likely longer term needs, to enable more confident management in the community
• Conversations between a patient and their primary care professional (GP or nurse), to help support manage their condition in the community
• To enable patients with less risk of recurrence to receive appropriate support and care, whilst minimising unnecessary clinical appointments

Evaluation

The programme evaluation and executive summary report which you can view below were published in March 2021. The evaluation highlights the benefits to both people diagnosed with cancer and the region’s cancer care workforce, that came from the £5 million programme.

The evaluation’s purpose was to:

• Understand the processes by which change was achieved
• Articulate the difference the changes made to people affected by cancer, professionals in health,care and the community and voluntary sector, as well as the whole system
• Draw out learning that could be shared and applied within the programme footprint and beyond

In the evaluation below you will find semi structured interviews with the programme managers, programme stakeholders, patients as well as professionals and volunteers following site visits from each of the locality projects. You will also find analysis of the: HNA data, Cancer Support Worker activity logs and completed patient surveys as well as a summary of achievements and conclusions from the project.

Evaluation Video: