Bright, welcoming, friendly, University College Hospital, Macmillan Cancer Centre in London is taking care to a new level
A chandelier, made from brightly coloured pieces of rubbish picked off British beaches, dominates the ground floor of University College London’s cancer centre on Huntley Street.
“It symbolises the journey the artist had on the way. That’s reflective of the journey of the patients here,” says Lallita Carballo, head of Macmillan’s Support and Information Services in the centre.
On a chilly London morning, it has the air of a minimalist hotel, or, perhaps, swish offices, rather than a place that treats 3,000 people a year facing life-threatening illness.
Opened last spring, the £100 million centre, aided by a donation of £10 million from Macmillan, seeks to combine every aspect of a patient’s needs from medical to support services under one roof.
“What is great about the centre is that three things come together: it doesn’t feel like a hospital, it is a great environment,” says the chief executive of Macmillan, Irishman Ciarán Devane.
“Secondly, the clinical medical care is global standard and then there is the information, care and support. What makes the place special is all three of them, acting together,” he tells The Irish Times.
Answering queries
In the Support and Information Service, patients, along with their loved ones, speak quietly to counsellors and advice staff, who deal with a multiplicity of queries.
Some need help with benefits. Others need counselling, many more will have questions about how to manage after their treatment is finished, the exercise they should take, or how to cope with fatigue.
“Before you would not have had that totality.
“We know that if people feel supported and have an understanding of what is available at the beginning, the quality of life outcomes are much better.
“If people don’t have support at the beginning of their journey, they can often feel very abandoned and quite alone after their treatment is finished.
“Quite a lot of people feel disempowered when they come into hospital, disempowered by the whole experience. Treat them with respect, decency and ‘adultness’, that’s our motto,” says Carballo.
Most, if not all, of the support services were available previously.
“But it’s different when you have everything together. When you dilute a service, you dilute the visibility and therefore people don’t see the relevance of it,” she goes on.
The centre is equipped with the latest technology to help diagnose and treat cancer more effectively, including the UK’s first PET MR scanner which provides detailed images with less radiation.
Unusually, Huntley Street is an “ambulatory” centre. Patients coming in for chemotherapy are able to leave the building with a back-pack. Some go to the movies before they return.
“Patients only come in for day treatment. There are no inpatients. It is very common in the US. Some people may have to have daily treatment,” Carballo goes on.
However, some patients have to come in daily and travel long distances for care that they cannot get locally, staying in the hospital’s Cotton Room hotel on its grounds.
On the third of the centre’s five floors, some patients lie on beds, or sit in chairs while receiving chemotherapy. Others mill around a huge table in the centre of the open space.
“The environment has been designed to offer privacy for those patients who want it, but also to have different types of space, to sit with a family, or friend,” she goes on.
Throughout, the emphasis is on light: “Often people complain about the lack of daylight in hospitals. It makes people feel better. Here, there is lots of it, along with bright colours.”
Ten months on, the University College Hospital and Macmillan – Britain’s most influential cancer charity – are still making changes, benefiting from carefully gathered feedback from patients.
If patients have had to accommodate new ways of doing things, then so too have the clinicians: “It was a real culture change for people,” says Macmillan’s Andrea Shufflebotham.
Clinicians’ role
Too often, the clinicians’ involvement ends with the treatment, which led to a series of training sessions – sometimes difficult to arrange – before Huntley Street opened
“The things that make the biggest difference for patients are the things that the people who are giving them the treatment are the least likely to signpost,” she goes on.
“Patients come out and feel totally alone. They have been looked after all the way through but then they are left with the side effects of treatment.
“Some people are left with psychological issues having coped all the way through. The adrenaline stopped and now they have to go back to work,” she continues.
Recently, Devane accompanied the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, during a visit to Huntley Street, when the latter was approached by a patient.
“She spotted him and wandered up, telling him that she was not easy to please. Then she went on about the support centre, saying how it had helped during her ‘horrible’ treatment.
“She said she had been falling apart, but that she had been able to go in there, to have a conversation with someone who knew what she was facing, to have a cup of tea. To have someone to talk to, who knows.”
