By Charlene Gatt
SUNSHINE Hospital was a big winner from the Brumby Government’s first budget with a $73.5 million cash injection delivering the western suburbs’ first radiotherapy unit and a teaching, training and research facility.
The unit, which is provided in conjunction with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, will initially house two linear accelerators in two of four bunkers, with the other two implemented over time to meet growing demand.
The service will cater for nearly 900 cancer patients every year and reduce the need for patients in the public system to travel to the city, or regional areas, to receive radiotherapy treatment. At present, patients can receive private cancer care at Footscray’s Western Hospital.
“Local families, cancer patients, who need that radiotherapy care, that life-saving care, can now get it in the community they live in. (This is) better supporting them, better supporting their families by building a more comprehensive service system close to home,” State Health Minister Daniel Andrews said.
“It’s a key challenge and one that touches everybody, whether it’s personally, or through family and friends. We want to build the services that can help us cope with that.”
The facility is part of the State Government’s $150 million Cancer Action Plan aimed at fast-tracking cancer treatment across the state to raise survival levels to 74 per cent by 2015. Latest figures show 61 per cent of people diagnosed with cancer go into remission.
Mr Andrews toured Sunshine Hospital last Wednesday and paid a visit to Hoppers Crossing resident Maureen Greed, who was undergoing ankle surgery.
Mrs Greed’s late husband was a cancer sufferer who had no access to local services.
“The West is often quite isolated,” Mrs Greed said.
Mr Andrews admitted the project was a “long time coming”.
Meanwhile, the new teaching, training and research facility – dubbed TTR West – will take form in a five-level building that will house lecture theatres, seminar rooms, clinical skills facilities, wet labs, an auditorium and a library.
The joint initiative between Western Health, the University of Melbourne and Victoria University will see researchers studying diseases prevalent in the western suburbs, such as diabetes, heart disease and osteoporosis.
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The University of Melbourne will establish an on-site clinical school to provide undergraduate and postgraduate training of doctors in the West, while Victoria University will train nurses and allied health professionals in a new centre. Each institution has committed $8 million towards the project.
The facility is tipped to receive a further $7 million from the Federal Government in this week’s budget after the Rudd Government pledged the sum before last year’s federal election.
Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon’s office would not confirm or deny last week whether the funds would be available in the budget, while Gorton MP Brendan O’Connor was equally vague.
“I’m pleased with the State Government’s commitment to redevelopment of the Sunshine Hospital. The Federal Government looks forward to working with the State Government to ensure better health facilities for the western suburbs,” he said.
Western Health CEO Kathryn Cook said the facility hoped to host 112 medical students and would help alleviate the continuing challenge of attracting medical staff.
University of Melbourne Professor Peter Ebeling, chairman of the Department of Medicine at Western Health, thinks geography is partly to blame for this problem.
“We do have problems in getting a good medical workforce in the western suburbs so this is one way of really solving the problem by getting the best and brightest graduates to come out to Sunshine and what’s going to become a world-class building,” he said.
The funding is phase two of a proposed $184 million redevelopment of the Furlong Rd site. The hospital received $20 million in last year’s state budget to create a new 128-bed East Wing.
Australian Medical Association President Dr Doug Travis called the funding a “positive first step”.
“Now we need to see the government commit to the next stages of the redevelopment so the hospital can become bigger and better and meet the health-care needs of the 21st century,” he said.
