This spring, The Royal Marsden Private Care expanded its presence in London by opening a new state-of-the-art diagnostic and treatment facility in Cavendish Square within the Harley Street Medical Area (HSMA). Professor Chris Nutting, Consultant Clinical Oncologist and Clinical Director of the Royal Marsden Private Care at Cavendish Square, gives some insight into the facility’s rapid diagnostics capabilities and vision to deliver the best cancer care for patients in the UK and around the world.
A unique integrated model …
“The Royal Marsden is a very long-established specialist cancer hospital. We’re Europe’s largest comprehensive cancer centre and rated as one of the leading cancer centres in the world. In the UK we are registered as an outstanding Trust by the CQC in terms of our delivery of care to patients. We see and treat around 60,000 NHS and private patients in The Royal Marsden l each year and have the largest NHS private patient unit of any UK centre.
We’re a large comprehensive cancer centre; that means we provide surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, nursing – all supportive services for patients undergoing serious illnesses – and research is a major part of what we offer here at the Royal Marsden..
In terms of our private care offering, we have many patients from the UK and from around the world who come here for our specialist services.
The Royal Marsden has a unique integrated model in which all revenue generated from the Private Care service goes back to the NHS Foundation Trust. This provides the best of both worlds for patients and clinicians.
The hospital offers an integrated cancer service in terms of its variety of breadth across all different types of treatment and all different types of cancer, including adult cancers, rare cancers and paediatrics. This combination of NHS and private care allows us to have the breadth of experience and depth of knowledge to treat large numbers of patients and deal with whatever issues they come to us with.
Our new centre on Cavendish Square
We are very excited that we’ve opened our new centre on Cavendish Square in April of this year, which is an outpatient diagnostic centre. The purpose of the centre is to expand our private care capability to patients both in the UK and coming from overseas. We have outpatient facilities for seeing patients with different types of cancer. We have scanning, CTMR, mammography, ultrasound – all the usual imaging that cancer patients might require, and we also have a large chemotherapy suite.
The Harley Street location enables us to integrate with the Harley Street area medical services. We are closer to a lot of patients coming from all over the UK, so access to travel hubs is better in Central London, and also close to the international patients who often are living in Central London and the other hospitals and clinics who can support our services.
One of the major things that we hope to offer in Cavendish Square is rapid access, so we have invested in technologies providing rapid access to blood tests, tumour markers, scanning, all the diagnostic work. I think that often it’s the week or two weeks in a cancer patient’s journey which is the most critical, and there’s a real urgency for them to understand the staging of the cancer, what the treatment is going to be and to get in front of the most appropriate specialist as quickly as possible, so that’s really the goal of Cavendish Square to be able to offer that, allowing patients to see the top specialist and that area and be given a treatment recommendation which is highly specialised.”
