The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham is among the first wave of hospitals in England to benefit from a major national investment in NHS radiotherapy machines alongside £200m of funding over two years to improve local cancer services.

NHS England NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens recently announced a £130m investment to kick-start the upgrade of radiotherapy equipment and transform cancer treatment across England.

Today he revealed that University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the QEHB, is one of 15 Trusts where older linear accelerator (‘Linac’) machines will be upgraded or replaced, ensuring patients get access to the latest leading edge technology regardless of where they live.

Around 4 in 10 of all NHS cancer patients are treated with radiotherapy, which typically uses high-energy radiation from a Linac machine. It is recommended that Linacs are replaced after around 10 years in operation. However, the last time there was a major national investment in NHS radiotherapy machines was in the early 2000s.

The new £130 million fund will, over the next two years, enable half of the five year modernisation programme recommended by the Independent Cancer Taskforce. The investment will pay for over 100 replacements or upgrades of radiotherapy machines in hospitals around England.

The £200m fund has been set up to encourage local areas to find new and innovative ways to diagnose cancer earlier, improve the care for those living with cancer and ensure each cancer patient gets the right care for them.

Cancer Alliances are being asked to bid for a share of the £200m fund to use to invest in three priority areas:

Early diagnosis

• Early diagnosis can save lives, so extra funding will be given to local NHS doctors and managers who have the best ideas about helping people to get their diagnosis quicker and stop them bouncing between GPs and hospitals. This could mean supporting specific tools for GPs to use to help them recognise cancer, like the Macmillan decision support tool; setting up diagnosis services to be able to test and rule out a number of different things quickly; and improving local communications systems to ensure information is passed securely and quickly between hospitals and GP surgeries.

Care during and after cancer treatment – “Recovery Package”

• The aim of the Recovery Package is to help ensure patients have more personal care and support from the point they are diagnosed. For a patient this means working with their clinician to develop a comprehensive plan outlining not only their physical needs, but also other support they may need, such as help at home or financial advice.

Care after cancer treatment

Once treatment is finished, it is vital that people continue to have the right care and support. This will be different for everyone and it is important to work with people to develop an appropriate plan to suit them, instead of a one size fits all approach where people are booked in for appointments at set time scales. Some areas are doing this very successfully, but for others the additional funding could be used to personalise follow up to individual needs and preferences – for some, more intensive clinical support is needed, but others may feel confident to take control and manage their own care.