Cancer patients concentrate all their depleted energy on surviving and then in regaining their health. For many, the prospect of also wrestling with the complexities of the benefits system is too daunting and they miss out on payments they are entitled to just when they should least be worrying about how to make ends meet.

The increasing effectiveness of cancer treatment means that thousands of people are now living with cancer as opposed to dying from it.

Yet the problems they face tend to be little aired, perhaps because it seems ungrateful or churlish in the face of such a positive outcome.

Compared with the question of life or death, how to juggle the household budget becomes paltry.

Cancer patients who are unable to work as a result of their illness, however, will face a sudden drop in income they had not expected, coinciding with an increase in expenditure for travel to hospital and extra heating costs.

The news that more than £42m has been paid in five years in welfare benefits and hardship grants through the intervention of Macmillan Cancer Support is another demonstration that charities are far in advance of the policy makers in identifying and finding solutions to emerging problems.

Macmillan is a case in point. Best-known for providing specialist cancer nurses, originally on a voluntary basis, its growth has mirrored the increasing incidence of the disease.

By providing support beyond the medical, its staff realised that nine out of ten people suffering from cancer will experience a drop in income and a rise in living costs resulting in additional stress.

Five years after their first welfare benefits advice project was set up in Lanarkshire it has generated almost £9.3m in welfare benefits, providing clear evidence of how much people had been struggling.

The partnership with the Citizens' Advice Bureau enabled Macmillan staff to add their specialist understanding of the needs of cancer patients to expertise which already existed instead of re-inventing the wheel. It is a lesson which other voluntary organisations should learn from.

Politicians and social security advisers to the government should also take note that more than half of the £1.6m of the hardship grants given by Macmillan in Scotland last year was used to pay household fuel costs.

Cancer patients find it very difficult to keep warm, making extra fuel costs inevitable.

At a time of high increases in the cost of fuel, such as last year, many must have faced real worry about how they were going to pay the bills.

The case for extending the fuel payments scheme to some cancer patients should be examined.

More people now live with cancer in their daily lives and increasing numbers strive to avoid unemployment by continuing to work around courses of treatment yet they (and their carers) often need more time off work than their holiday entitlement.

That is not easily accommodated by a benefits system based on an assumption that people are either employed or unemployed, but perfectly understood by Macmillan, which has been able to provide grants to allow people to take extra time off.

The Scottish government's £500,000 support for the Macmillan network is deserved recognition of its effectiveness, but policy makers should also be adopting its innovative thinking.