Question: does your line of work require a lot of funding

Rob Brass answered on 13 Jun 2016:

Lots!

We have 11 treatment machines based in 2 different sites (one in liverpool and one on the Wirral) and each machine costs about £1.5 million! On top of that you have the cost of all our measuring equipment, which easily tops £1 million, and the cost of all our software and computers – we have hundreds of computers throughout the department. As a rough guide, we’re in the middle of building a new centre in the middle of Liverpool which is about half the size of where I work now and it’s costing about £120 million without the machines! (we’ll take them with us).

It does require a lot of funding to set up, although as a fraction of the (ever smaller) NHS budget it’s quite small! In fact, once your radiotherapy department is set up the cost of treating a patient is very small, we receive a few hundred pounds per treatment from the government (their estimate of how much it costs us) whereas the cost of drugs for chemotherapy is ridiculously high! We’re talking tens of thousands.

I heard recently that radiotherapy only receives about 5% of the NHS cancer budget, even though it is involved in around 40% of cures!

Bit of a political rant in the end but its a sore subject at the moment!