History
St. Luke’s Cancer Centre is situated within the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford (United Kingdom). It is the tertiary cancer centre for the Surrey, West Sussex and Hampshire Cancer Network, and serves a population of 2 million people. The original centre opened in the “old” St. Luke’s Hospital in 1964, and the current centre moved to the “new” Royal Surrey County Hospital in 1996.
Beginning in the summer of 2022, St Luke’s Cancer Centre will embark on a £6.2 million expansion and modernisation plan. This will include doubling the amount of clinical space to support the increasing demand for its cancer services.
Profile
St Luke’s Cancer Centre is one of the largest oncology services in the country, treating up to 200 patients a day, with an ongoing focus of delivering chemotherapy closer to home. There is a dedicated 34 bed haemato-oncology inpatient ward (with isolation rooms for radionuclide patients, and single rooms for immunosuppressed / infected patients), with other oncology patients being cared for on site-specific wards within the Royal Surrey County Hospital, e.g. patients with lung cancer on the respiratory ward. In addition, there is an excellent designated Teenager and Young Adult Service.
St Luke’s offers state-of-the-art diagnostic and treatment services. Referrals are received from across the country for specialist services, such as urology and brachytherapy. The radiotherapy department is one of the few in the UK to have an Adaptive Varian ETHOSTM allowing real time adaptive radiotherapy, plus seven Varian Truebean® (one STX with ExacTrac and four with 6 degrees of freedom couch).
Specialties
St. Luke’s Cancer Centre treats most adult malignancies, but does not treat paediatric malignancies; it treats haematological malignancies, but does not undertake haematopoietic stem cell transplantation at present. The Royal Surrey County Hospital is the regional centre for head and neck surgery, upper GI surgery, hepato-pancreatic-biliary surgery, gynaecological surgery and urological surgery (but also undertakes various other type of cancer surgery, e.g. breast surgery, colorectal surgery).
Palliative and Supportive Care
The supportive and palliative care team consists of three consultants in palliative medicine, six clinical nurse specialists, three junior doctors and a medical secretary. In addition, a highly specialised occupational therapist and project manager works to deliver the enhanced supportive care service.
The supportive and palliative care team provides a seven day service to the district general hospital and associated cancer centre. The enhanced supportive care team provide five clinics a week for symptom control in patients with cancer.
The teams run an active education programme. There is also an active research programme, with the main research themes being end of life care, opioid induced constipation and cancer pain.
Last update: February 2023
