Read an update from Lotte about how she's developing our secondary breast cancer services, and our plans for the future.
Why did you join Breast Cancer Now?
I’m Lotte and I joined Breast Cancer Now in April 2024 as the new projects and business growth manager for our secondary breast cancer services team.
I’d worked at two management consulting companies before, but realised I wanted to pursue a more meaningful role where I could really see that I was making a difference. My mum had had breast cancer and a good friend works in the charity. So I applied and was very pleased when I got the role!
The role was a new position, specifically tasked with helping to reach more people and broaden our secondary breast cancer services. This involves raising awareness of the support we offer and making sure our services are accessible and meet the needs of people living with secondary breast cancer.
How are you developing our services?
We’ve already got some fantastic services. We have 50 Living with Secondary Breast Cancer in person groups around the UK. And we’ve been growing our Speakers Live service, where people can hear from experts on a range of topics online.
We’ve got a fantastic team who coordinate all of these services around the UK and online.
We also knew there were opportunities for improvement, particularly in our online services. I was asked to lead a review, which involved hearing from Voices and people who’d used our services through focus groups or interviews.
Since completing the review I’ve been working on delivering those recommendations. For example, some people told us that it can be daunting to attend an online or in person group, so we’ve been piloting a service called the chat group. In this group, people can type messages to each other without having to turn on their camera or microphone.
We hope that by removing the need for cameras and microphones in the chat group, more people will feel comfortable trying out our services.
Another finding from the review was that people want us to offer our services over a wider range of times. We’ve now added an evening option into our monthly Living with Secondary Breast Cancer online sessions and so far delivered two Speakers Live sessions in the evening.
How are Voices involved?
It was really important to us that we involve people living with secondary breast cancer in developing the services. We wanted to get honest feedback and new ideas from the people who would be using our services.
So last year, we set up a lived experience advisory group to help us think about how we can develop our services. Everyone in the group is a Voice living with secondary breast cancer. We meet online about every 6 weeks and cover different topics each session.
The advisory group are by far what I’m most proud of since joining Breast Cancer Now. They’ve consistently helped us understand more about what people living with secondary breast cancer need from us, and they've challenged our thinking.
Something unexpected to come out of the advisory group is how important hope is for them. They felt that hope should be key a outcome in the services we offer. We’ll now be including a question about hope in our evaluation surveys. And we’ll start to think about how our existing and new services can increase hope.
One of our advisory group members heard I was doing this blog and wanted to share their thoughts:
“The most important part of the advisory group for me is feeling that the advisory group are not just a tick box activity. The team could easily get defensive if we are challenging or disagreeing with them, but that is never the case, and we feel really listened to and valued. It’s really exciting knowing that tangible things are changing for secondary breast cancer patients within Breast Cancer Now, and that we are a part of that change!”
What’s next for the advisory group?
I’m excited to be working with the advisory group on what services we'll be developing as part of the new Breast Cancer Now strategy for 2025-2030, where supporting people living with secondary breast cancer is a key priority.
Shape our future services
We're currently looking at whether to develop a new 1-to-1 peer service for people with secondary breast cancer. Take our survey to tell us whether you'd be interested in this service, and help us decide it's future direction.