Accessibility of Radiotherapy

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. There is a combination of reasons, which I will come on to in a moment, but distance from treatment is undoubtedly the critical point that decides whether people can access and take advantage of lifesaving and life-prolonging treatment.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

rose—

[Tim Farron]

I feel that the hon. Member has a point to make.

[Jim Shannon]

First, I commend the hon. Member for championing this issue for all the years I have known him in this House. He deserves credit for that, he has got this debate in Westminster Hall today, and we are looking to the Minister for a response. Does the hon. Member agree that the issue goes more widely, and is also about recruitment? Training and retention of clinical oncologists is needed, with only seven in 10 training places filled in 2024. Does he agree that there is a way forward—bursaries for students, which could begin to fill the training needs in the long term? Students would understand that they will not live under the burden of student debt if they pick a career for life—in other words, help them with a bursary and the NHS will have them forever.

[Tim Farron]

I completely agree with the hon. Member. Many people watching the debate today, whether physically in the Gallery or on television outside, are part of that outstanding workforce, and we are massively grateful to them. What a career for someone to be in, where you are saving lives every day and alleviating pain. That is a wonderful thing, yet there are not enough of them. The workforce is part of the solution, as well as the challenge, to the problem that we face.

For us in Westmorland, longer journeys mean shorter lives. The answer is clear for us in Westmorland, and that is to build a satellite radiotherapy unit at the Westmorland general hospital in Kendal as part of the Rosemere unit, following the model of the many excellent satellite units around the UK. The number of cancer patients travelling from south Cumbria each year for radiotherapy provides demand for at least one linear accelerator at the Westmorland general hospital. If the experience of other new satellite centres around the country is replicated, such as at the new Hereford site, which is a satellite of Cheltenham, a satellite centre in Kendal would attract at least 20% more patients than existing demand, because people who would not have had radiotherapy treatment at all beforehand would now be able to access it, simply because it is closer to them. That a satellite unit in Kendal has not already happened is an indictment of the lack of responsiveness to the obvious need from NHS England, and of a lack of concern for cancer patients and their families who live in rural communities.