“I CAN’T think of anybody that doesn’t want to have radiotherapy in Swindon – it is purely finding the money to make it happen.”

That is the view of Great Western Hospital’s medical director and clinical director of radiology, Dr Alf Troughton, who believes the town would be one step closer to having radiotherapy had the recession not hit when it did.

But despite the economic downturn, Dr Troughton, who is currently interim chief executive, is hopeful that Swindon will have its own radiotherapy unit within the next three years.

“It is not right that patients are having to travel to Oxford. In an ideal world patients wouldn’t have to travel, I think everyone in Swindon feels that way and we would like to bring it here,” he said.

“It is a long complicated process, and even if we had the money today and bought the machines tomorrow, it would take at the earliest, two years to build.

“It is something I wanted to do right from the start, I felt it was something we needed to do to help secure the future of the hospital.

“The more services we can offer on site, the better we think our hospital is.

“We think this should be a health campus rather than just a hospital, and on this campus we want to have all the facilities possible for the people of Swindon and the surrounding areas, and radiotherapy fits in to this plan.

“I think it is realistic, I think it will be here, it is unfortunate we were getting some of the way with doing this when the bank crisis hit.

Dr Troughton said he would support a fundraising campaign for a radiotherapy unit, despite the total costs expected to run into millions of pounds.

He said: “Since we became a foundation trust, we have got a lot of members and a lot of governors, and they are keen to get behind the hospital and we are keen to be the local hospital for local people.

“I think fundraising for the hospital would be a good idea.”

When the Great Western Hospital was built, Dr Troughton said it was designed so that additional services could be added on at either end, but said a radiotherapy unit built on land separate from the main building would be easier to fund and cause less disruption to patients.

He said: “Great Western Hospital does have the room for radiotherapy, there are two options. One is to have a completely separate build which would be slightly easier to fund.

“But the downside is if any patients needed x-rays or further treatment because they became unwell, we may have to call an ambulance to get them to the main hospital even though it is not far away.

“Our original preference was for it to be joined up to the hospital by the emergency department – the hospital was designed in such a way that it could be added on to but it would be a bigger job to do that, and much more disruptive.

“It involves digging huge holes in the ground called bunkers which would probably be hard to do on an existing building.”

And with an expected rise in the number of patients requiring radiotherapy in the future, Dr Troughton ruled out the possibility of moving some of the six radiotherapy machines at Oxford’s Churchill Hospital to Swindon.

He said: “In the future, more conditions will be treated with radiotherapy and with changes in treatment, those currently receiving radiotherapy may need more treatments, so there will be an increase in the number of people that require radiotherapy.

“So although Oxford don’t like the fact that patients have to travel from Swindon, their main concern is they’re not going to have enough capacity in the future, so it makes perfect sense to build something in Swindon.

“Radiotherapy is a specialist service and we are not a specialist hospital. It cannot be underestimated how complicated it is, it is a very specialist subject which we have no skills on how to do it.”

NHS Swindon is about to put out a tender for the unit, which will cost between £10m and 15m.