'It would risk my health if my cancer care moves'

Matthew Venner says his children will not be able to visit him if his care moves

A south-east London cancer patient has said he feels lets down and disappointed by plans to move his treatment to another site 40 minutes away.

Matthew Venner, from Chislehurst, has stage four Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and receives regular treatment at the Princess Royal University Hospital (PRUH) in nearby Orpington. But the NHS trust plans to move cancer services to King's College Hospital in Camberwell.

The 42-year-old said the journey there would put his life at risk and his two children would not able to visit him due to the distance.

King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which runs both sites, said the proposals were aimed at improving care and no final decisions had been made.

Last month, King's College Hospital Trust announced it was considering bringing all haematology inpatient cancer care it provides to King's College Hospital and removing it from the healthcare offering in Orpington.

This would mean patients like Mr Venner would no longer be able to get the inpatient care they need at the PRUH. Instead, they would receive that care at King's, in Denmark Hill, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

He said: "I feel let down. I feel disappointed.

"I've had state-of-the-art drugs. I've had brilliant nurses and consultants. My clinical nurse specialist has been fantastic. I haven't faulted anything, but now they are going to make it worse."

Distance 'too big' for children to visit

"I'm incensed," he added. "They haven't taken into any consideration the discomfort of that journey. They don't know how much that is going to cost. Will that journey be in an immune, safe environment?"

During Mr Venner's inpatient stays at the PRUH, his children spent time with him each day after school while he was recovering.

But this would not be possible if he was treated at King's, he said.

"The distance and the time is just too big. If they get told that they can't see daddy until the weekend, that is really hard," he said.

"If I get an infection, or dare I say it, next year it comes to end-of-life care, which could happen quickly with lymphoma, if that's not here [at the PRUH] I will have my end-of-life care at Denmark Hill."

A King's College spokesperson said: "These proposals are being developed by hospital clinicians, with the aim of improving care for patients accessing haematology inpatient services at the PRUH.

"They also build on existing arrangements already in place, whereby some haematology cancer patients from the Bromley area who require highly specialist treatment are already transferred to King's College Hospital for this aspect of their care."

A petition calling for the trust to keep the specialist inpatient haematology cancer care at the PRUH has almost 25,000 signatures.