Hospital celebrates 10 years of bone cancer unit

Staff at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital (RJAH) are taking part in a week-long celebration marking 10 years of the bone cancer unit being open to patients.

The Montgomery Unit at the RJAH, near Oswestry, is one of five specialist bone cancer centres in the UK, treating things like bone and soft tissue sarcomas.

"The unit has our outpatient clinics, offices for the nurses, consultants, admin team and secretaries, and the ward is upstairs - which is a dedicated 10-bedded unit built specifically with our patients in mind," said orthopaedic oncology surgeon, Gill Cribb.

"It's really the best experience it can be, in some of the most frightening times of these patients' lives."

Cribb has been at the RJAH since 2009, specialising in bone and soft tissue tumours.

Looking back, she said the environment had transformed over the years.

"At the beginning, when the service started up, the office for the nurses and the admin team was a converted toilet off the main corridor," she said.

"We shared some beds with one of the general wards here in the hospital.

"The secretaries no longer need to push all their paperwork over to our unit in a shopping trolley in the rain."

She added: "Patients have often travelled long distances, and so that their families can stay with them, where appropriate, there's enough room for an extra bed to be brought in to the patient's room."

"They have a wet room, their own tv, their own Wi-Fi."

Christopher Anthony, also a surgeon on the unit, said having the space is vital for patients.

"A lot of our patients come and get given very difficult news, so having a slightly quieter environment where they're not sat in a waiting room with 20 or 30 other people certainly helps, it makes it a much kinder environment," he said.

"A lot of our patients are in their late teens and early 20s, and it means that they can have relatives staying with them during what's undoubtedly a very difficult period of their lives."

He said he hoped the unit could grow in the future.

"We're looking to expand our consultant numbers, develop our research and contribute more to the sarcoma community."

Celebrations of the 10-year anniversary took place across the week, with a party - including a birthday cake - on Wednesday.

In attendance was Roger Wilson, who founded the charity Sarcoma UK, partly because of his treatment at the RJAH before the unit was formed.

Diagnosed in 1999 and moving between the Oswestry site and a hospital in Manchester, he said he had never met another patient, and so the charity was formed.

Wilson was declared tumour-free after having treatment via a trial.

"We've always felt warm and comforted by the team here," he said of the RJAH.

"Our first visit here was before a team existed, we just saw a surgeon, nothing else was there in terms of support.

"I met Professor Cool fairly early on in his term as the lead consultant here, and he was very clear about what he wanted to do in terms of building a unit, a unit that was passionate and committed," he said.

Cool developed the unit that is now celebrating its 10-year anniversary.

"He achieved that, and he's passed that mantel on to the people here today - they're wonderful, they really are."

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