Read our strategy for 2025 and beyond

In June 2021 we published our Five Year Strategic Plan for 2021 to 2025. The strategy set out what we planned to achieve by 2025 in line with our six strategic priorities: Be Outstanding, Be Collaborative, Be a Great Place to Work, Be Research Leaders, Be Digital and Be Innovative. And we have delivered almost everything we set out to achieve - you can read more about that below.

Now we are sharing our strategy for 2025 and beyond. It explains how we will continue our work, building on all we have achieved together since 2021 to deliver the very best for people with cancer. The strategy also explains how we will continue to work with our partners across Cheshire and Merseyside to provide excellent cancer care as close as possible to patients' homes. 

As you would expect, it also highlights our ongoing commitment to strengthening relationships with other Liverpool Adult Acute and Specialist Providers (LAASP) to establish a city-wide hospital group, the NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group (UHL Group). Although the strategy was written before the 10 Year Health Plan for England, it already incorporates many of its key themes including digital innovation, prevention and providing services outside hospital where possible.

Chief Executive Joan Spencer said:

The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre has a clear mission of improving patient outcomes and experience for people with cancer, which is underpinned by a clear strategy to achieve that, and we have a fantastic track record of delivering what we set out to achieve.

We have refreshed that strategy for 2025 and beyond to reflect the progress we have made, the context around us, our new partnerships, and the logical next steps for improving cancer outcomes and experience across Cheshire and Merseyside in line with the 10 Year Health Plan.

Strategic priorities graphic - 6 C shapes and the words Be Outstanding, Be Collaborative, Be a Great Place to Work, Be Research Leaders, Be Digital, Be Collaborative
Our strategic priorities: Be Outstanding, Be Collaborative, Be a Great Place to Work, Be Research Leaders, Be Digital, Be Innovative

 

Highlight achievements from our Trust Strategy 2021 to 2025

Be Outstanding

  • We have been one of the top performers every year in the National Inpatient Survey.
  • We've launched a range of new services including interventional radiology (IR) and CAR-T cell therapy. Our metastatic spinal cord compression (MSCC) service has led the way nationally and was the model used for the new national NICE guidelines. 
  • Our Teenage and Young Adult (TYA) unit is now fully open with dedicated inpatient beds, along with day case, social activities and peer support. We have also transformed urgent cancer care, inpatient care and outpatient care so patients get the right care in the right place as close to home as possible. 
  • Patients are living longer with cancer. We are also seeing reductions in health inequalities - that means patients from areas of highest deprivation now have outcomes in line with those from more affluent areas. 
  • We have continued to perform well on waiting times and other operational standards.

Be Collaborative

  • Cheshire and Merseyside Cancer Alliance has continued to go from strength to strength and is seen as a national trailblazer. As well as hosting CMCA, we have also played a very active role in its work including urgent cancer care - this includes acute oncology, Hotline and CDU, MSCC and work to raise awareness of Cancer of Unknown Primary (CUP) and malignancy of unknown origin (MUO).
  • We now host the Cheshire and Merseyside Diagnostic Programme which is transforming diagnostic services across the region. 
  • We opened two community diagnostic centres (CDCs) to support the wider NHS. Paddington CDC opened in 2023 and has now helped more than 50,000 patients get their tests more quickly. We also opened Clatterbridge Diagnostics in Wirral in partnership with Wirral University Teaching Hospital. 
  • Patients are being diagnosed earlier through initiatives such as lung cancer screening and living longer, thanks to the care they receive. CCC staff have been great at making sure patients can access the newest treatments as soon as possible. 

Be a Great Place to Work

  • We have consistently performed well on the National Staff Survey and have seen year-on-year improvements in our results.
  • We rolled out our award-winning MyAppraisal system in response to staff feedback to help people get the most from their appraisal each year.
  • In response to feedback, we also rolled out a wide range of health and wellbeing events along with Schwartz rounds, clinical supervision, support for international staff and much more. 
  • The annual Staff Excellence Awards are now a highlight of each year, attracting hundreds of nominations. We have also revised and improved other reward and recognition schemes including the monthly Staff Achievement Awards and long service awards.
  • We now have a wide range of staff networks including Ethnic Diversity, LGBTQ+, Mental and Physical Lived Experience (MAPLE), and Veterans.
  • Staff can access a huge range of education and training through the Learning Prospectus, as well as apprenticeships, the ACCEND framework and much more. Feedback from students and trainees has also been positive. 
  • Hybrid and flexible working has also been rolled out widely.

Be Research Leaders

  • Our early phase trials unit carries out a range of first-in-human clinical trials. 
  • We are now one of the biggest centres nationally for cancer vaccine research, with more trials open than almost anywhere else. 
  • Research now has dedicated inpatient beds as well as dedicated daycase facilities and pharmacy aseptic capacity for trials work. We have also opened a research lab at CCC-Aintree making trials much more accessible to patients who are treated on the Aintree site. 
  • The Liverpool Experimental Cancer Medicines Centre (ECMC) was successfully reaccredited.
  • We are now part of the NIHR Liverpool Clinical Research Facility (CRF), together with Liverpool University Hospitals and Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital. Our Biobank is the dedicated biobank for the CRF.
  • We are also part of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) with The Royal Marsden and Institute of Cancer Research. 
  • Research income has grown significantly since 2021 in line with our plan. 

Be Digital 

  • We are now delivering our Digital Strategy, helping patients and staff through improvements such as our new patient portal, telehealth, remote health monitoring, robotic process automation (RPA) for mundane tasks and the new MyAppraisal system. 
  • Our Digital Team (including Business Intelligence) has won multiple awards over the last few years. They have also been national pioneers for new digital roles and a national NHS digital skills accreditation framework.
  • Our electronic patient record (EPR) has been significantly improved through the ‘Getting the Most from Meditech’ programme, which tackled key issues staff had raised. 
  • We perform extremely strongly on the NHS digital maturity assessment and on cybersecurity measures, including CyberEssentials Plus accreditation.
  • Digital has also played a huge role in transforming how we all work and how we deliver services, both day to day and through large transformation programmes. 

Be Innovative

  • We now have an Innovation Strategy and an award-winning Innovation Team - we won the prestigious ‘Innovation in Workforce Culture’ trophy at the North West Coast Research and Innovation Awards 2025.
  • Dr Seamus Coyle, our Clinical Lead for Innovation, has been leading truly groundbreaking research on the biology of dying. 
  • Staff can now put forward innovative ideas to win funding from our dedicated Innovation fund, generously provided by Clatterbridge Cancer Charity. This ‘Be Innovative’ scheme has recently been redesigned and relaunched with associated training sessions for staff. (It combines the previous Big Ideas and Bright Ideas schemes.) 
  • Innovation governance has been strengthened with the establishment of the Trust-wide Innovation Committee (IC) and the Executive Innovation Commercial Committee (EICC).
  • An adapted fleece for chemotherapy patients is now being piloted after prototypes were produced for patients to trial. The fleeces were an idea put forward by a patient who found it tricky to put clothing on (or take it off) during long intravenous treatments. 
  • Other innovative ideas supported by the scheme have included an adapted screenholder for patients who need to lie flat for long periods e.g. due to metastatic spinal cord compression. Another staff idea was a breast cancer radiotherapy walk-through video for prospective patients, which has now had more than 1,600 views.
  • We are collaborating with Pfizer and other companies to design an AI voice chatbot patient symptom platform (Symbot).