FINAL approval for a £3m Lister Macmillan Cancer Centre has been given with construction work to begin in September.
Board members for the East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust, which runs Lister Hospital, gave the chemotherapy centre the green light at a meeting on Wednesday.
The approval means part of the hospital building in Coreys Mill Lane, Stevenage, currently used as an administration area, can be readied with work due to begin in earnest for its refurbishment from September 16.
The project, run by the Trust in collaboration with cancer charity Macmillan Cancer Support, will also see a new unit built to address capacity issues and provide cancer patients with the latest treatments in a more spacious environment.
The Trust will contribute £1.45m to the build, expected to be ready in May 2014, with Macmillan committed to raising the remaining funding through sponsorship.
“I am delighted that the full business case to build the new £3m Lister Macmillan Cancer Centre has been approved by the Trust board,” said Trust chief executive Nick Carver.
“This is the final formal step that allows work to build the new cancer centre to start, which is being funded jointly by Macmillan and the Trust. If all goes to plan cancer patients will start to use the new unit from May 2014 – something that we are all excited to see happen.”
Carol Fenton, general manager of Macmillan Cancer Support, said: “Every year, 1,500 people in east and north Hertfordshire are told that they have cancer and over 10,000 will need treatment. The oversubscribed facilities at the Lister Hospital in Stevenage simply do not do justice to the care provided by the award-winning staff.
“This approval by the Trust board paves the way for vastly improved cancer care at the Lister. The exciting challenge we now face is to raise £1.5m in the coming months.”
The approval follows the opening of a £3m Lister Scanning Centre on the Stevenage site earlier this month which houses two state-of-the-art CT scanners and an MRI scanner.
The scanners provide high quality imaging for patients, including for those with cancers and strokes, as well as for emergency scans.
A second MRI scanner is also in the process of being installed in an extension to the centre, which is being created as part of Lister’s £150m transformation into the Trust’s main hospital for emergency and inpatient care by the end of 2014.
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