Welcome to Beads of Courage UK (BOCuk), formerly known as Be Child Cancer Aware (BCCA).

In the early days, BCCA was created to increase awareness of all childhood cancers, after hearing time and time again about families struggling to get a confirmed diagnosis of cancer for their sick child. We very proudly created, produced and distributed the UK’s first ‘signs and symptoms’ awareness card, outlining the most common indicators of all childhood cancers. We had a great response to this and in our first couple of years distributed over 4 million awareness cards to families and schools. It is fantastic to see how much of an impact our awareness card has had, with multiple charities of varying sizes now raising awareness and participating in Childhood Cancer Awareness month, held annually in September.

BCCA was initially set up by 3 families, (the Drummonds, Watts and Wests) as all 3 families are parents to a child who received a cancer diagnosis. When 3-year-old Ted Drummond finished his treatment, he was presented with a small plastic medal (which his family still treasure) saying WINNER on one side and MADE IN CHINA on the other. They felt that after his challenging 2 years of treatment, this medal did not convey the scale of Ted’s journey to someone who had not been there to see it - it did not tell his story. Because of this, BCCA then decided to search for a way to support children on treatment, both emotionally and socially, and found Beads of Courage in America. After 12 months of planning with BOC.inc in America, we launched our first UK hospitals on the Beads of Courage UK programme; The Royal Marsden, Basildon and Birmingham Children’s Hospital. We are proud to say that we now provide Beads of Courage UK in every children’s oncology ward across the United Kingdom*.

Through our continued growth, we have been fortunate enough to see just how large an impact the BOCuk programmes have had on the mental health and wellbeing of patients enrolled with us. The beads give children a positive, tangible means to communicate with their peers about their journey, whilst also opening up lines of communication surrounding the lack of knowledge of childhood cancers.

We knew that the BOCuk programme could not only benefit oncology children, but all children with a serious chronic or life-threatening condition; this led to us introducing the Chronic, Cardiac, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), Burns and Sibling programmes. Because of this expansion, we could no longer work under the name BCCA as our programmes involve patients that aren’t oncology, thus Beads of Courage UK was born!

*Beads of Courage UK is provided to all oncology hospitals that want to participate in the programme