Staff at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital (RJAH) are taking part in a week-long celebration marking 10 years of the bone cancer unit being open to patients.
The Montgomery Unit at the RJAH, near Oswestry, is one of five specialist bone cancer centres in the UK, treating things like bone and soft tissue sarcomas, external.
“The unit has our outpatient clinics, offices for the nurses, consultants, admin team and secretaries, and the ward is upstairs – which is a dedicated 10-bedded unit built specifically with our patients in mind,” said orthopaedic oncology surgeon, Gill Cribb.
“It’s really the best experience it can be, in some of the most frightening times of these patients’ lives.”
Cribb has been at the RJAH since 2009, specialising in bone and soft tissue tumours.
Looking back, she said the environment had transformed over the years.
“At the beginning, when the service started up, the office for the nurses and the admin team was a converted toilet off the main corridor,” she said.
“We shared some beds with one of the general wards here in the hospital.
“The secretaries no longer need to push all their paperwork over to our unit in a shopping trolley in the rain.”
She added: “Patients have often travelled long distances, and so that their families can stay with them, where appropriate, there’s enough room for an extra bed to be brought in to the patient’s room.”
“They have a wet room, their own tv, their own Wi-Fi.”
