Cancer Support Near You
Workshop: Map The Gap, Map The Support
A co-design workshop bringing community organisations, people with lived experience, carers, charities and local-system partners together to identify the support people need, map existing trusted services, and define what makes information useful and trusted.
Date: 23 October 2026 –
Time: 11:00 Am – 1 Pm
The Problem
People often face a fragmented support landscape. Helpful services may exist, but they can be difficult to discover: information is spread across websites, referral pathways are unclear, and smaller trusted community groups are often invisible in conventional directories. This situation is especially challenging for people facing language, transport, financial, cultural or digital barriers.
Key Questions
1. Who needs Support?
- Who currently struggles most to find cancer-related support locally?
- At what stage do they need help?
- What question are they likely to ask first?
- What would make them trust this resource?
2. What support already exists?
- Emotional and peer support
Practical and financial support - Carer and family support
Screening and cancer-awareness support - Rehabilitation and living after treatment
- Culturally specific, language-specific or faith-based support
- Transport, digital and accessibility support
3. Where are the gaps?
- “People say they need help with…”
- “A service may exist, but it is difficult to access because…”
- “This community is least likely to see itself reflected in available support…”
- “The information that is most often missing is…”
- “We would know this map is working if…”
4. What should the solution address?
Participants may pick options from the following list:
- Search by postcode, or town
- Search by type of need
- Mobile-friendly access
- Clear referral/self-referral information
- Language and accessibility information
- Ability for an organisation to update its own listing
- Save, print or share a list of local support options
- A simple way to suggest a missing service
Cancer Support Near You!
As the NHS moves care closer to home through neighbourhood health, people affected by cancer should not have to navigate a fragmented support system alone. Useful help may already exist locally, but it can be difficult to find—particularly for carers, families and communities facing barriers linked to language, transport, finances, culture or digital access.
Cancer Support Near You is a proposed community-led resource map that will bring trusted, non-clinical support into one accessible place. It will help people and the community workers who support them find local services such as peer support, carer support, welfare and benefits advice, transport, rehabilitation, bereavement support, screening information and culturally relevant community services.
The project complements neighbourhood health by making the local support ecosystem easier to navigate, strengthening the visibility of voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations, and identifying where support is difficult to access or missing altogether. It is not a replacement for NHS care, clinical advice or existing referral pathways; it is a practical bridge between people, communities and the support around them.
The initiative will begin with the “Map the Support, Map the Gaps” co-design workshop at the Cancer Innovation and Future Leaders Conference 2026. Community groups, carers, charities, local leaders and health-system partners will help shape the pilot, identify trusted services and define what equitable local support should look like.
Join us in making cancer support easier to find—and ensuring that no community is left out of the map.