Published on 30 July 2025
Cheshire and Merseyside Cancer Alliance has been shortlisted for four national healthcare awards for its work to improve urgent cancer care and promote patient engagement.
Our teams are finalists in the Picker Experience Network (PEN) Awards 2025, the only UK awards that are totally focused on patient experience.
The Cancer Alliance’s Health Inequalities and Patient Experience team has been shortlisted in the Patient Contribution section for their Patient Recognition work and for the Personalisation of Care Award for: “Using powerful stories from patient storytellers to create significant impact and deliver measurable and identifiable improvements to patient experience.”
The Personalisation of Care Award is aimed at how the system has improved patients’ experience through acting on the needs of individuals, with often the smallest things having the biggest impact. The HIPE team support patient experience in cancer across Cheshire and Merseyside, delivering the patient voice into the centre of service design and improvement. Storytelling is embedded into board agendas for CMCA and the Diagnostic Programme and the team have used their time and skills to help share people’s stories, using these powerful experiences to change future outcomes.
In addition. the HIPE team have nominated a patient representative for the Patient Contribution Award, spotlighting the critical role patients have in improving the experience. Our patient/carer representatives feel confident to deliver their story and we feel confident their experience will help us to deliver change. Our nomination is for a patient representative who is dedicated to helping shape and develop cancer services in Cheshire and Merseyside to ensure high-quality care for all.
The sub-region’s Urgent Cancer Care programme, which was developed at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre (CCC) and is now led by the Cancer Alliance, is also a finalist in two categories of the Picker Experience Network (PEN) Awards 2025, the only UK awards that are totally focused on patient experience. It has been shortlisted in the Cancer Experience of Care Award and the Partnership Working to Improve the Experience Award.
Many cancer patients face having urgent cancer care (UCC) in hospital emergency departments and the programme – the first of its kind in the UK – is designed to improve this service, giving the right care in the right place at the right time. A UCC strategy has been developed and is now being adopted across Cheshire and Merseyside. The programme includes partners from across the sub-region including acute trusts and primary care.
Key achievements include:
- Reducing cancer patient attendance at emergency departments (ED) by increasing referrals into more suitable alternatives such as same day emergency care (SDEC) and urgent community response (UCR)
- Enhancing the CCC Hotline service including triage, reducing waiting times, and signposting patients to ED alternatives such as SDEC and UCR
- Transforming acute oncology with new data capture tools
- Significantly improving the pathways for patients with suspected or diagnosed metastatic spinal cord compression
- Significantly improving the brain/malignancy of unknown origin pathway.
Entries linked to the urgent cancer programme have also been shortlisted for five Nursing Times awards, including for Team of the Year and the Emergency Care Nursing Award.
CMCA Deputy Director Tracey Wright said: “We are delighted that this excellent work by our colleagues and partners is being recognised at a national level in these awards. Well done to everyone involved!”
“The teams at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, Cheshire and Merseyside Cancer Alliance and our urgent cancer care partners across the system have put a huge amount of work into improving pathways for people with cancer who need urgent and emergency cancer care, and they are delivering fantastic results.
“And our patient experience team at the Cancer Alliance is really successful in helping to give our patient representatives a platform to help us improve cancer treatment, care and outcomes across Cheshire and Merseyside. Their inspirational stories inform our cancer care teams and raise awareness of cancer and the need for prevention, screening, and early detection.”
The teams will find out if they have won at the PEN Awards ceremony in Birmingham on Thursday 2nd October. Read more about the PEN Awards 2025 and find the full shortlist.