The tried and tested partnership between the charity Hope for Tomorrow and Great Western Hospital took another giant step on Monday (September 29) with the unveiling of a new mobile chemotherapy unit (MCU) that will soon be visiting Marlborough’s Savernake Hospital once a week.
Hope for Tomorrow raise the funds and provide the hardware and GWH provides the staff and running costs. This unit cost £280,000. Apart from its Savernake service, it will also visit Calne and three sites in Swindon.
There to inspect the new unit were Marlborough Mayor Marian Hannaford-Dobson and her husband Stewart Dobson. They both have reason to applaud this development for Savernake Hospital as both their previous partners died of cancer. They know all about travelling long distances for treatment.
GWH’s Trust chairman, Roger Hill, explained that the unit “Offers the Trust the chance to increase treatment capacity at the hospital as well as providing treatment closer to home.”
He said that diagnosed cases of cancer were increasing at three per cent a year. And the use of chemotherapy with new and improved drugs was increasing at about ten per cent a year.
John Exelby, a former BBC television news journalist, was there, he said smiling broadly, as the ‘token patient’. He spoke very highly indeed of the chemotherapy treatment he had received at GWH for pancreatic cancer: “There’s nowhere better to come than here. The staff are quite amazing.”
It is hoped to have the unit in operation by the end of the year – once staff recruitment and training are complete. But as Lead Chemotherapy Nurse Helen Winter told Marlborough News Online: “It is not very easy to find specialist nurses with suitable qualifications.”
The MCU will have a designated parking place at Savernake Hospital and patients will be asked if they want to have their treatment in the MCU. It will treat about eight patients each day.
This unit is named ‘Linda’ after the wife of Captain Don Conley who has been a supporter of Hope for Tomorrow for many years: “It is absolutely wonderful that this new MCU will perpetuate the memory of Linda who as a Wiltshire County councillor worked very hard and enthusiastically in supporting the people of Wiltshire.”
This is Hope for the Future’s eighth MCU since the charity was founded in 2007.
One of the main donors to the charity is the Mark Benevolent Fund of the Grand Lodge of Mark Master Masons. Over the next four years, up to their 150th anniversary in 2018, this fund will pay for a number of MCUs which Hope for the Future will launch across the country.
Hope for Tomorrow’s president, Lord MacLaurin, said at the ceremony: “Our ambition is to have one unit near or attached to every oncology centre in the country.”
Until April this year, Hope for the Future’s other Wiltshire MCU had been visiting Savernake Hospital. But commissioning priorities meant it had to be switched to the Salisbury area.
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