This year has been a year of change for the NHS and the Alliance and we anticipate next year will see further significant change with the publication of the ten year plan and the anticipated focus on cancer as demonstrated in the Darzi report.

When I started in my role in September one of my key priorities was to develop the Alliance clinical leadership team and I am delighted we have appointed John Park as our Medical Director and Lyndel Moore as our Cancer Clinical Lead for Nursing and Allied Health Professionals. We have recruited Chris Lima as Head of Business and Change Management to lead our organisational development programme, and our administrator, Tayo Gaji who provides much needed administrative support across the whole team. We are now about to embark on further recruitment to expand our data and informatics team, expand our team focussed on primary and community care programmes, and to create pathway specific roles to deliver our pathway improvement.

Building and developing our team gives us the foundations and resources we need to meet our ambitions for improving cancer services for our population, and to meet the requirements set for us by NHS England.  I look forward to working with you all on this renewed focus as we welcome new members to our team.

This year has seen some great achievements on the roll out of the circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) test across the Alliance. ctDNA has the potential to reduce time to treatment in lung cancer pathways and our Lung CAG is working in partnership with the Genomic Medicine Service Alliance (GMSA) and Astra Zeneca is providing project support.

The Targeted Lung Health Checks have been well underway in Swindon and now Oxford and Bucks are making great strides in this. This is such an important opportunity to diagnose people at an early stage and increase their chance of positive outcomes.

Focusing on patient experience is an important part of our work and we were delighted to welcome Jen Richardson in the new role of Macmillan/TVCA Cancer Genomics Pathway and Workforce Programme Manager. Jen will be working closely with patients, primary care and Trust teams on planning and implementation over the next two years. We have also successfully recruited to the ACCEND programme manager and look forward to them starting on this exciting and important work.

We have also been building up our patient representative group and look forward to working with them to understand how best to use their expertise and insight across our plans as part of our communications and engagement strategy. I would like to thank everyone across the  Alliance who supported the development of the strategy. We have been building relationships with key groups across our community, and particular highlights this year were the Filipino community event in Reading this summer (where we were able to recruit a patient representative) and the Children’s celebration event held at OUH. Getting to these events and making those community connections is so important to understanding what we might do to better represent the people we work with and support.

We have much to look forward to next year and a lot to be proud of from this year’s work. I wish all of you a happy Christmas and look forward to the new year and the opportunities that will present to improve services for people with cancer and the people who care for them. Thank you for all your hard work and dedication to cancer services across Thames Valley. I hope you have some downtown over the holiday season to spend with those close to you.