Skip to main content

This site is best viewed with a modern browser. You appear to be using an old version of Internet Explorer.

Chemotherapy treatment going ahead as normal

10/01/2018
This article is more than six years old.

You may have seen some inaccurate headlines in the national and local news that suggest we are planning to delay or decrease chemotherapy treatment at the Churchill Hospital due to staff shortages.

These news stories are based on an internal email from one of our clinicians that was shared with The Times newspaper. This email from Dr Andrew Weaver sets out some of the challenges facing our chemotherapy service, with his ideas for how to tackle these issues, and invites constructive comments and alternative proposals from other cancer doctors and clinical staff.

We would like to reassure our patients that this does not represent a change to our formal policy for chemotherapy treatment. No such changes have been made or will be made before thorough consideration has been given to all possible options.

At Oxford University Hospitals, we have consistently met the national cancer waiting time standard (starting chemotherapy within 31 days of a decision being made to do so) for the last three years. This is a standard we are committed to maintaining.