COLCHESTER’S new £24million cancer treatment centre has moved a step closer to fruition.

Hospital trust officials have submitted a planning application to Colchester Council to build the radiotherapy centre on the Colchester General Hospital site, in Turner Road.

The two-storey building would replace outdated facilities at Essex County Hospital and help meet growing demand for radiotherapy from north Essex’s increasingly ageing population.

Demand is such at present that the existing unit is regularly working late because it does not have not enough equipment to fit in patients. otherwise.

Dr Phil Murray, consultant clinical oncologist and clinical director for cancer services, at the unit, said: “We have capacity issues.

“We’re working on an extended day through to 7pm, simply to cope with our workload, so this is a pressing issue.

“I’ve been here 20 years and I’ve been repeatedly disappointed in the past.

“I’m really proud of the department here, but it’s a bit like having a small family.

“You love your house, but when you have three kids and only two bedrooms, you have to move.

“The new machines we’re hoping to get are really going to make us one of the best-equipped departments in the whole country.”

If Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust’s application is approved, the unit will be biggest development at the hospital since it opened in 1985.

The centre would replace three ten-year-old linear accelerator machines with five state-of-the-art ones.

Several past proposals to move radiotherapy to Colchester General Hospital have foundered, including a private finance initiative plan, which collapsed in 2006.

Dr Murray stressed north Essex did not have an excessively long waiting list for radiotherapy and said patients received great care from dedicated workers.

He added the new centre would allow the trust to offer more patients intensity-modulated radiation therapy, which increases the survival rate and reduces side-effects.

He also hopes more patients will be able to benefit from image-guided radiotherapy, which helps doctors target treatment more accurately.

Colchester Council is expected to make a decision on the proposal – for a site between the main hospital building and Gainsborough wing this summer, allowing it to open by the end of next year.