Dr Laurel Spooner supports our Save our Cancer Surgery campaign

She has been a GP for more than 25 years and is an accredited GP trainer.

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Dr Spooner was also a GP tutor for Barts and The London Medical School for ten years and is President of the Association of Surgeons in Primary Care and a member of the Council of the Association of Surgeons in Great Britain and Ireland.

Here she supports the Gazette's Save Our Cancer Surgery campaign and says why the centre should be based in Colchester.

THERE should be one urology cancer surgery centre for the whole of Essex and in Colchester rather than Southend.

The population of Essex is roughly 1.7million. In any one year the number of people developing different types of urological cancer will depend on how common the cancer is.

Urology covers prostate cancer (common), bladder cancer, (common), kidney cancer, less common, testicular cancer, less common still and a few others such as cancer of the penis which is extremely rare.

How difficult it is to remove a cancer will depend on where it is, how large it is and whether or not it has spread.

How well a surgeon does a difficult and complex operation depends on how many he has done.

For example, research has shown the average surgeon who does more than 50 cystectomies a year, (a relatively uncommon operation to remove the whole bladder for advanced cancer), has much better results than the surgeon who does ten a year.

By contrast a small straightforward cancer of the lining of the bladder, which is what the majority of bladder cancers are, can easily be removed with a cystoscope.

It is done thousands of times a year in local hospitals in the UK rather than in designated surgical cancer centres. Only complex surgery needs to be referred.

Big cancer centres have another advantage. They can afford hugely expensive state of the art equipment which would not be financially possible for two smaller centres.

They also treat so many patients with the same sort of cancer that trials can be run to find out which treatments work best. This essential research can only happen in big centres with teams of experts working together and coming up with new ideas.

Dedicated specialist teams do not only have greater surgical skills but also more experience of handling post-op complications which can be fatal.

Research has shown surgery to remove the whole prostate is safest in cancer centres treating a population of more than a million people. Bladder removal is done less often so a cancer supracentre serving a population of nearer two million is better.

The principle of centralising surgery for complex and rare operations is in order to build the expertise and facilities which will give the patient the best result.

Staying alive with as little disability as possible is what matters most to every patient.

Travelling 100 miles to a cancer surgery centre and staying there for a week or less, may seem daunting but who would not gladly do it once they knew the odds? In reality every patient with cancer is travelling on a long journey with many stops but only one or two of those stops is likely to be surgical.

The journey is in three parts. The first leg is the diagnostic pathway when information is gathered from the patient and tests are carried out in order to make the diagnosis.

Once the diagnosis is made the patient enters the treatment pathway. There is a lot to cope with. One or all three of the following are offered - surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. It depends on the characteristics of the tumour being treated.

Ask anyone who has had cancer and they will tell you that the surgery is the quickest part whereas radiotherapy and chemotherapy mean many appointments over weeks or months. These would all be at the local hospital unless they had to travel further afield for radiotherapy. Luckily Colchester is a major radiotherapy centre.

Across the UK figures have been improving for most cancers and it is thought this is partly due to the better results achieved by bigger centres and this is why we should be campaigning for one centre.

For the following reasons we should argue that it should be in Colchester: Colchester Hospital’s new cancer centre serves a population of 700,000 whereas Southend’s provides for only 340,000.

Colchester also has more urology surgeons than Southend. Last year Colchester Hospital invested £250,000 into new staff and laparoscopic equipment and in addition Colchester has the Iceni Centre which is renowned worldwide for laparoscopic surgery.

In 2013/14, Colchester surgeons performed 178 complex urological cancer operations and Southend surgeons performed 105. It sounds far more sensible to move a smaller number of patients from Southend to Colchester than a larger number from Colchester to Southend.

In fact, 105 patients travelling from Southend is only two a week and occasionally three.

Besides, Southend patients if they wish are better placed to use London hospitals than are patients from the Colchester area.

But let us be honest. Both hospitals have financial difficulties, staff shortages and a lack of beds.

If the merger is not funded and properly organised cancer patients could end up worse off squashed into one inadequate new centre.

This is what the campaign should really be about – getting one urological cancer surgery centre for Essex properly funded in Colchester. Furthermore we should be asking Colchester Hospital University Foundation Trust to review its use of resources because there seem to be many patients attending hospital who do not need to be there.

Reorganising their care so it was delivered in community clinics or in their homes would make space and save money for the care of seriously ill cancer patients.

Some areas of the country are well ahead with doing this.

No-one wants to go to hospital for care they could have in a clinic or at home but when seriously ill everyone wants to go to the hospital that will give them the best chance.

For cancer patients in Essex we want that to be Colchester hospital.

Read more about our Save Our Cancer Surgery campaign by clicking HERE.