£100,000!

HOW the £17 million Christie’s radiotherapy centre will look at the Royal Oldham Hospital when completed next year

LAUNCHED TONIGHT: FUNDRAISING FOR NEW £17m CHRISTIE CENTRE IN OLDHAM

THE world-famous Christie Hospital has teamed up with the Oldham Chronicle to launch a £100,000 appeal to help it bring lifesaving treatment to Oldham.

The “Christie at Oldham” Campaign aims to raise the sum to support the work of the new £17 million radiotherapy centre which is in the process of being built at the Royal Oldham Hospital.

The centre will be open to patients at some point next year, and fundraisers want to hit the £100,000 target before that date.

The building will be home to two £1.3 million linear accelerators, which will be used to give radiotherapy treatment to 70 patients every day.

And it is towards the cost of those that today’s campaign has been launched.

The centre is the first in a network of Christie radiotherapy centres which aim to take first class radiotherapy treatment provided by Christie experts closer to people’s homes.

It will directly benefit the people of Oldham, and 1,200 patients who currently travel to the Christie each year from Oldham and the surrounding areas for a total of 18,000 radiotherapy treatments will be saved the journey.

The new centre will save patients travelling 324,000 miles between them every year - as far as the moon and one-third of the way back - and around 12,000 travelling hours.

Patients from Oldham now face a long day driving the three hours to the Christie and back, on top of the treatment.

The new centre will treat patients from Oldham, Rochdale, North Manchester, Middleton and part of Tameside, mainly for the most common cancers such as breast, prostate and lung.

Radiotherapy will be administered by Christie doctors, specialist radiographers, nurses and other medical experts.

Patients with very rare and complex cancers, and some lung cancers, will continue to be treated at The Christie in Withington.

The Christie is currently the only centre in Greater Manchester and Cheshire to provide radiotherapy, a specialist procedure which uses high energy radiation beams to destroy cancerous cells.

In Oldham alone there are over a thousand new cases of cancer a year. In 2005, 1,209 Oldham people were given the devastating news they had the disease.

A number of people have already pledged their support to the campaign, but many more are needed to ensure its success.

Fundraisers in the Christie appeals office are eager to hear from anyone who can help in any way possible, be it by holding a coffee morning, party or a car wash.

They want businesses to adopt the campaign as their charity, and have thrown out a challenge for Oldham people to help them reach the ambitious £100,000 target in the next 12 months.