DR Graham Read's "dream" will come alive when the £5 million Lancashire and Lakeland Radiotherapy Unit opens on the doorstep of East Lancashire on February 24.

As clinical director of cancer services at the Royal Preston Hospital, he has spearheaded the crusade to open the doors of the first specialist cancer unit in the county.

He said: "As the time nears for opening, so the work and anxiety is increasing. I hope that the reality will bear some relationship to what I have dreamed of."

Debate has been rumbling on how much patient activity will be taken away from Christie Hospital, Manchester, by the Preston unit.

But at the heart of the question is the fact that, eventually, patients from East Lancashire will no longer be forced to travel 30-plus miles for stamina-sapping, but life-saving treatment.

Health chiefs believe that patients will probably be faced with the luxury of a choice of centres for radiotherapy.

East Lancashire patients are unlikely to be able to use the new unit until 1999. Initially, the team at Preston Acute Hospitals NHS Trust is planning to accept patients living in health authority areas nearer the unit. Contract talks between East Lancashire Health Authority, which buys the health care of the district's 500,000 residents and health bosses in Preston are continuing.

Cancers treated during the first year will be breast, lung, gastro-intestinal, urinary, gynaecological, bone, leukaemia and central nervous system.

All others will be treated from 1998, except rare childhood cancers which will be treated elsewhere.

Dr Read said: "It is difficult to believe that it is now six months since I started on my own in a single office on Ward 25, especially as the directorate has now appointed more than 50 staff.

"Setting up a unit with a blank sheet of paper is, of course, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the ability to incorporate all of the practices one has always wanted in a cancer unit, without any of the frustrations which come from being told - 'we've always done it this way." The new unit will be equipped with two £500,000 linear accelerators which produce high-energy X-rays for the treatment of tumours.

Next to the unit will be Bowland House which will provide a "hotel style" accommodation for people undergoing radiotherapy who live a long way from the unit but who do not need inpatient care.

Radiotherapy unit manager Margaret Abraham said: "The major concerns have been recruiting radiographers with the right levels of expertise and enthusiasm to carry forward our vision.

"I need not have worried."

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