‘Best Cancer Unit In Britain’ Opens

“The conditions in the Beatson are appalling. The reception area is like Piccadilly Circus, and you walk down a long narrow corridor with dark alcoves where patients are lying on trolleys. It really is like something from the third world.” These were the words of Nicola Sturgeon back in December 2001 when she was Shadow Health Minister and Scotland’s biggest cancer centre was at the height of a staffing crisis.

Ms Sturgeon went on to bemoan that the new accommodation promised by health board NHS Greater Glasgow would not be ready for five more years, but yesterday, just a little behind schedule, the new Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre at Gartnavel was unveiled for the first time.

With broad corridors splashed in pastel hues and wards of no more than four beds overlooking roof gardens and courtyards, the replacement hospital certainly exudes a different atmosphere.

While the existing Beatson, on the Western Infirmary campus, still has mixed-sex wards and rows of beds Florence Nightingale-style, nearly 40% of patients staying in the new facility will have single rooms.

The chemotherapy suite has its own balcony so patients, who often feel hot during treatment, can step outside for air, and even those too weak to walk can benefit from computer controlled ceiling lights that gently fade from lime to yellow to pink and blue.

Isobel Neil, general manager, said better still is the new outpatient consultation area. At the moment everyone waits together and descends a long corridor for their appointment when called. The new hospital has three times as many rooms and they are arranged in sections, so people with different conditions can be dispersed to different pods.

Professor Alan Rodger, medical director at the Beatson Oncology Centre, said: “We have got more space and that is easier for staff and patients rather than being cramped. It is better space as well. It is all more comfortable.”

The centre will also boast a 12-seater cinema, a room with computer and music equipment in the adolescent wing, an aromatherapy and massage hub, a hairdresser and a beautician.

However, with little more than six weeks to go before the first overnight patients are expected, such innovations are not apparent save for labels on doors. The most visible improvement is the shades of mustard and turquoise in the corridors, apparently chosen from photographs of west of Scotland scenery.

Yet in some ways the most dramatic benefits offered by the £105m facility, which encompasses 1000 rooms over five storeys, will never be obvious to the untrained eye.

More special bunkers with thick concrete walls for brachytherapy, where radio-active wires or grains are implanted close to a tumour, have been built.

This means patients with gynaecological cancers will be able to have therapy sessions that last little more than 10 minutes. At the moment they face a night in hospital and hours of gruelling treatment.

Better technology for taking images of tumours and using this to plan precise, possibly more intense, radiation will also come on line with the new hospital. In fact, Professor Rodger said the equipment manufacturer used by the health board has told him the Beatson now has virtually everything in their catalogue.

He said: “There is nothing else out there they can sell us at the moment and they are the biggest manufacturer in the world.”

So is this cancer unit now the best in Britain, as Professor Rodger promised before he moved into his role? “I think it is but I am the medical director,” he said. “If you take the technology I do not think we can do better. If we take clinical trials into account, I really think it is the best in the UK.”

Migration from the Western Infirmary site to the new Beatson has already begun. The first overnight patients are due to stay at the end of next month and the last radiotherapy machines at the Western will be taken out of use by September.

Then people will know if a new era has really begun.