Co-locate Velindre is a healthcare campaign group contending for the best cancer care in South East Wales and in particular opposed to the new Velindre’s standalone location. Along with the majority of cancer specialists in the NHS today, we expect any new cancer centre in be ‘co-located’ with a large hospital (UHW favoured). It must have the same facilities available to patients as other UK Cancer Centres.
That means any cancer centre must be on, or adjacent to, a facility with 24/7 acute care. It must have medical, surgical and speciality support services along with a leading, high-level research capacity. A stand- alone Centre will be unable to offer patients this and all the many therapies developing today, while opportunities to participate in research trials will be severely limited. This is a matter of health equality in Wales and through the whole UK.
The Colocate Velindre core group is primarily but not exclusively, editorial, involving 5 senior clinicians experienced in cancer care (plus a comms non-clinician) one of these at NHS director level. Some of them continue to work in patient care. However, more than this, CV supports, defends and amplifies the overwhelming consensus of cancer clinicians and eminent academics regarding new NHS cancer centres.
These include the External Advisory Board to the Cancer Research Centre for Wales, and also many other clinicians who have driven virtually every new NHS cancer centre in the UK in the 21st century. The group is also indebted to the 160+ regional senior clinicians working in cancer who in turn represent many more colleagues. Further categories could easily be added.
The core five editors, then, draw on a wider community, colleagues and overwhelming consensus on new cancer centres. These, and any guest editors, routinely referee, or collaborate in, all CV’s major comms to news media and may sometimes do the same with correspondence. CV can claim purely to reflect an authoritative, cancer clinical consensus in UK on new cancer centres and even a worldwide one shown in current WHO research and publishing.
