We’ve been working hard over the last year to improve the care and experience of our cancer patients, meeting the national standards for more than a year in a row and offering new state of the art radiotherapy treatments. 

So what’s next?

At the moment patients are treated at the hospital that best suits their needs, regardless of where they live. The majority of patients are treated at Queen’s, where we have our radiotherapy centre, specialist medical expertise and a specialist pharmacy team, as they have more complex needs. At King George we provide less complex treatments, two days a week. 

We also know that patients benefit from having their health and wellbeing needs supported at a different location to their clinical treatment.

So in line with our clinical strategy, we’ll be delivering all our chemotherapy treatments from the Sunflower Suite at Queen’s Hospital. 

That leaves us free to develop the Cedar Centre at King George into a Living with Cancer and Beyond health and wellbeing hub, providing a range of support to help patients and their families manage their cancer well, from diagnosis to post-treatment.

Due to staff shortages we are bringing our plans forward, and from 12 November will deliver all chemotherapy from Queen’s Hospital. This will allow us to use our resources as efficiently as possible and continue to provide high quality care. Chemotherapy nurses are highly specialised so this will help support us to ‘grow our own’ nursing workforce and we aim to become a centre where people want to come and work, and stay working with us, through improved, support, training and development opportunities.

We have a dedicated oncology car park very close to our Sunflower Suite and patient transport will continue to be provided where our consultants feel it is required, as we do currently. 

We’ll be opening the first phase of our Living with and Beyond Cancer hub at King George Hospital in early December and we’re looking forward to working with our patients and partners to develop these services further.

The Cedar Centre will be our main hub, and we will continue to provide some of our current health and wellbeing services, such as our Macmillan information centre, at Queen’s. We are also looking to expand our existing Enhanced Supportive Care service which supports patients with a terminal diagnosis, and will be offering this service from the Cedar Centre.

If you have any questions please contact:

• Fiona Kenton, Divisional Matron for Cancer and Clinical Support, on 01708 435 000 ext 6839
• Jodi Brooking, Haematology and Oncology Outpatient Team Lead on 01708 435 285

We will continue to keep you updated as our plans progress.