Alliance Blog

A day in the life of a Cancer Clinical Nurse Specialist – Lisa Hodgson25th April 2023

National Cancer CNS Day is now in its second year and takes place on 26th April 2023. Here Lisa talks us through what a typical day in this role can look and feel like. Thank you for sharing this with us Lisa and a massive thank you to you and […]

The Role of the Cancer Clinical Nurse Specialist – Caroline Tweedie

National Cancer CNS Day is now in its second year and takes place on 26th April 2023. Here Caroline talks us through what this role entails. Thank you for sharing this with us Caroline and a massive thank you to you and the rest of the Cancer CNS workforce for all you do […]

The Importance of Health Promotion4th April 2023

Our Healthwatch Cancer Community Awareness Workers have recently received some very good feedback, highlighting the important role they carry out across the region. “I was at the Healthwatch stand at a recent Health and Wellbeing Fair and I wanted to give some very grateful feedback to the team! “I won a box of bath bombs […]

Meet the team… Karen Stenlund, Workforce Lead21st February 2023

Hello, I’m Karen and I’m the Workforce Lead for the Northern Cancer Alliance. I first started working in the NHS over 35 years ago in an administrative position … in the days before mobile phones and laptops! After a few years I was managing clinical coding and clinical audit/governance teams and in the late 1990’s […]

Macmillan Cancer Specialist Nurse Workforce Development Programme in the North East and Yorkshire

The Northern Cancer Alliance (NCA) in collaboration with Macmillan Cancer Support (MCS), Health Education England (HEE), Yorkshire Cancer Alliances and Provider Trusts across North East Yorkshire (NEY) are participating in an innovative approach to improve the supply of Cancer Nurse Specialists (CNS). We know from previous CNS census studies that a high percentage of the […]

North East and North Cumbria Breast Pain Pathway23rd January 2023

Earlier this year the Northern Cancer Alliance (NCA) Clinical Director for Primary Care, Dr Katie Elliot asked the Managed Clinical Network for Breast Cancer (MCN) to review a breast pain pilot being run in the East Midlands. The information and data from the East Midlands pilot showed positive outcomes for patients and hospitals in areas […]

Healthworks Community Cancer Champions15th November 2022

Healthworks are a community health charity based in Newcastle who work with local communities across the North East, supporting people to live longer, healthier and happier lives by tackling health inequalities with a diverse range of projects, activities and interventions. One arm of the charity is cancer awareness, spreading key messages through word of mouth […]

Meet the team…. Sheron Robson, Programme Manager

I’m Sheron and I’m a programme manager at the Northern Cancer Alliance. I’ve been working at the Alliance for just over five years now and have a varied background working in travel initially, then moving into HIV prevention in the voluntary sector, operational delivery of sexual health services in a provider trust, before moving into […]

Using Behavioural Sciences to Address Health Inequalities

During Covid we saw numbers of cancer referrals fall significantly and although most have recovered since, some cancer pathways are still not seeing the numbers of referrals that we would expect or we are seeing later referrals in those pathways. To try and address this, Northern Cancer Alliance agreed that one of our priorities for […]

Be Cancer Aware

Be Cancer Aware is a co-production project that works with experts by experience from across the North East and Cumbria. Together we deliver education and training to the learning disability community and support campaigns raising awareness of cancer. On 28th September 2022 we were proud to be recognised by the Patient Engagement Network National Awards […]