St Luke's Cancer Fund

The St Luke's Cancer Centre is responsible for the provision of services to a population of 1.2 million and over 2500 new patients are seen in the centre each year. This figure does not include patients seen in the four Outreach Cancer Units who do not always come to St Luke's for treatment. The catchment area for the centre includes Surrey, from the outskirts of London stretching to the South coast, covering parts of West Sussex and North and Mid Hampshire.  We are specialising in more and more complex cancer surgery and our catchment area is ever expanding; St Luke's is becoming an Internationally recognised Cancer Centre.

The St Luke's Cancer Centre is a centre that strives for excellence.  It is essential to us  that patients get the most up to date treatment possible.  For instance, brachytherapy is a treatment for prostate cancer that the RSCH was one of the first in the country to deliver. St Luke's set up the service from scratch, which included completing the necessary training in America to ensure it was safe and effective. This has enabled appropriate patients to benefit from a procedure that was safe, with fewer side effects than routine treatment.  Another example is in the field of minimum access surgery, which we are now expanding to help cancer patients; we one of only five in the entire country who are embarking on this at the moment.

With the continued developments in cancer treatment, fundraising will always be a high priority for the centre.

In the last couple of years the St Luke's Cancer Fund has paid for:

• Part of the new building to house the CT Scanner
• Bought two new planning systems which will enable 3D planning.  This will speed up this very stressful and time-consuming, but vitally important, part of a patient's treatment.
• £400,000 for a second Gamma Camera, a special  camera that picks up radioactivity in the patient's body and it is used for diagnosing, and monitoring treatment.
• Chemo Chairs throughout the centre