Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron urges people to back his campaign to bring a radiotherapy centre to Kendal

IT’S a sad fact that cancer affects us all. According to Cancer Research UK, one in two of us will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during our lifetime.

That’s why I’ve written to every home in our area urging people to join our campaign to bring a radiotherapy unit to Westmorland General Hospital.

This is a very personal campaign for me. I lost my mum to ovarian cancer when she was just 54, and my wife Rosie lost her mum to pancreatic cancer at 63.

In 2009, we launched our campaign for cancer treatment in the South Lakes with the help of thousands of local people. Back then, patients had to travel many miles for both chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Thanks to your support, together we won our fight to bring chemotherapy to the South Lakes and since then, hundreds of people have benefitted from treatment.

Then two years ago, in the last days of the coalition, I persuaded the Liberal Democrat Treasury Minister to give us the £12 million we needed to open our new radiotherapy unit. The tragedy is that the incoming Conservative government cancelled that promise to local people just a few months later. This mean that people living with cancer in South Cumbria are still having to make the two-hour round trip to Preston to receive essential treatment.

However, I am determined to continue our fight. Local people living with cancer deserve to be able to have radiotherapy close to home. The Rosemere unit in Preston is excellent – I know, because my mum was treated there by the most compassionate and professional people.

But it is cruel to force people who are already very poorly to make a two or three-hour round trip every day, for weeks, in order to receive life-saving care.

Since sending out my letter to you all a few weeks ago, I’ve been taken aback. Not just by the volume of replies but by the heart-breaking stories of people having to make the long journey to Preston several days a week, for weeks on end to receive this critical treatment.

It is for those people that I am determined to fight and win our campaign to bring a satellite radiotherapy unit to Westmorland General Hospital - and now we have a new chance to do that.

Thanks to our efforts locally, we now have a new chance to get radiotherapy here in the South Lakes. NHS England is currently running a review of health services in South Cumbria and Lancashire. I have taken this opportunity to speak to the Chair of that review to formally ask for the long-overdue radiotherapy unit to be opened at Westmorland General.

We will know over the next year whether this request has been successful, but to give us the best chance of getting radiotherapy here, a strong showing of support from local people will be vital.

In a national review of the NHS earlier this year, the chief executive of NHS England committed to providing high-quality radiotherapy treatments for cancer patients “wherever they live” – we must hold him to that.

Only with your help can we succeed in making our mission to bring much-needed radiotherapy treatment to Westmorland a reality.

We’ve proven that by working together we can achieve great things, from winning the chemotherapy at Westmorland to getting the government to accept our calls to bring in an opt-out organ donation system.

As a community working together we are so much stronger – we can make lives so much better for hundreds of local people with cancer and for their families.

If you haven’t yet signed our petition, but would like to then head to https://timfarron.co.uk/en/petition/bring-radiotherapy-to-westmorland-general-hospital