Breast Cancer Now: Transforming the future of support

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Breast Cancer Now provides life-changing support services, reaching around 20,000 people each year. While its ambition was to scale delivery to reach more people, complex, fragmented pathways were preventing this from being achievable. People were encountering inconsistent experiences depending on how they accessed services, while internal teams were struggling with manual processes and duplication of efforts. 

Breast Cancer Now needed a way to reorganise their services into a holistic support offer, streamlining processes, improving the experience for service users, and ensuring long-term scalability in a cost effective sustainable way.

What we did

We conducted an operational review of Breast Cancer Now’s support services, including desk research, data analysis, and workshops with 36+ internal stakeholders. We quickly identified structural challenges affecting the whole support service model as well as tactical improvements to individual services.

We went on to focus on:

• Creating a shared vision for the future of services – We worked with stakeholders to define a clear, unified vision for how support should work, ensuring that future service development aligned with a common purpose.
• End-to-end mapping – We examined the entire service journey, from referral to service delivery and feedback, identifying inconsistencies and opportunities for improvement.
• Overarching operating model – We developed draft operating models for support services, ensuring clear, structured referral pathways that were simpler for users, volunteers and staff.
• Stakeholder engagement & buy-in – We facilitated discussions with senior leaders to gain alignment on the operating model to move forward with, and the more ambitious transformation efforts we were proposing, securing support for a single-entry referral model and expanded advisory services.
• Scalability & sustainability – By mapping the back-end operational processes alongside the user experience, we identified ways to scale services and improve user experience without requiring significant increases in costs and resourcing.

As a result of this work, Breast Cancer Now is now rolling out an integrated referral model that provides simpler access to all services, ensuring people receive personalised support regardless of how or when they enter the system. We continue to provide strategic consultancy, service design and user research throughout their service transformation.

Strategic outcomes and impact

Our work is shaping long-term strategy:

• A shared vision for the future – By creating a clear and unified service vision, BCN now has a strategic framework for growth and innovation.
• A future-ready support model – By thinking beyond individual services, we created a cross-service approach that recognises the diversity of service user needs and how they might change over time, whilst allowing for greater reach and sustainability.
• A structured roadmap for change – We helped prioritise strategic actions, ensuring BCN had a clear plan for implementation.
• Measuring success – We worked with leaders to define how impact would be measured, linking outputs (e.g., service delivery growth) to long-term outcomes (e.g., improved user experience and efficiency gains).

Cath Biddle, Director of Digital and Data at Breast Cancer Now said: "Healthia brought clarity to a complex challenge. They helped us step back, see the bigger picture and design a future model that works for both our teams and the people we support. Their approach is human, strategic and collaborative – they don’t just deliver recommendations, they work alongside us to make change happen."