Mothballed Bedlington cancer facilities could be helping cut waiting times, centre's ex-director claims

Rutherford Health ran a number of cancer treatment centres in the UK, including in Bedlington, until the company went into liquidation in June 2022, offering a variety of treatment types including relatively-recently developed proton beam therapy (PBT).

Professor Karol Sikora, formerly the medical director of Rutherford, has now called for the facilities to be put back to use, claiming they could cut waiting times for cancer treatment in the NHS.

He is calling for Health Secretary Steve Barclay, NHS England CEO Amanda Pritchard, and Siôn Jones, the COO of investment company Equitix that currently owns the unused centres, to meet and discuss bringing the facilities back into use.

However, the Department for Health and Social Care says the ex-Rutherford sites do not meet the requirements for treating NHS patients with PBT, and that there is currently excess capacity at existing NHS sites for this treatment.

These requirements include that the PBT machines are integrated into major cancer centres in hospitals, closely aligned with an academic centre, and comply with physical specifications not met by PBT machines at the Bedlington centre.

An NHS spokesperson said: “The NHS has purchased just under 200 brand new scanners over the last year including previous Rutherford assets which met NHS specifications, such as facilities in Taunton and Liverpool, as part of £2.3bn investment in diagnostic capacity.”

In the open letter, Professor Sikora argues that the site is capable of delivering diagnostics and a number of different cancer treatments with facilities “among the very best” he has seen.

This includes MRI scanners, CT scanners, chemotherapy suites, and other radiotherapy equipment.

The letter said: “To have them sitting empty at a time of record waits and unnecessary deaths is truly a national scandal.

“Roughly 20,000 patients a year could benefit from using the network, delivering radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and the state-of-the-art proton beam therapy.

“That extra boost in capacity would help to eradicate the backlog and save countless lives.”

In the letter, the professor describes the state of cancer treatment in the UK as “far worse than [he has] ever seen” in his career of nearly 50 years.

Local health service provider Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has recently been struggling to meet the target time for beginning cancer treatment following a patients referral.

Professor Sikora said the site’s owner Equitix “holds the power” to reopen the centres, but his letter said: “So far, little to no progress has been made and the facilities continue to gather dust. We must all agree that this is not in the public interest.”

Equitix has not responded to approaches from the Northumberland Gazette.

The professor adds in the letter: “Quite frankly, I don’t care how it is done. I just know that it needs to be done.

“Tens of thousands of patients would benefit, cutting down waiting times and undoubtedly saving lives.”