As well as funding cutting-edge clinical equipment and patient welfare projects across the region, one of our charitable aims is to help our local oncology workforce be the very best that it can be.
One way we can do this is by supporting them with relevant training to improve their skills and knowledge, and we recently awarded £2,628 to colleagues at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Lancashire Clinical Research Facility (CRF) to support a specialist training day.
The Lancashire CRF is located here at Royal Preston Hospital, to support the delivery of research studies and facilitate experimental medicine in Lancashire and South Cumbria, enabling people within our community to take part in clinical research. The NIHR Lancashire CRF is a partnership between Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Lancashire & South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Central Lancashire, and Lancaster University, and the teams conduct research in a wide variety of medical fields, although the majority of their current work is with oncology patients.
Because of this we were happy to support the day, which was aimed at developing the skills of the next generation of principal investigators to lead on experimental medicine and early phase trials. The funds we gave helped support the training initiative by covering things like catering, and travel and accommodation expenses for the expert speakers that presented on the day, to ensure that the event was as useful and successful as it possibly could be.
Over the years, we’ve supported the Lancashire CRF in other ways too, such as the initial funding of two clinical trials research nurses – roles which were made permanent and self-funding following their success.
While our funding of large-scale projects often gets the most attention – such as the installation of Surface Guided Radiotherapy Treatment at the Rosemere Cancer Centre, which cost us over £1.7m in total and resulted in the radiotherapy centre recently gaining a Centre of Excellence accreditation – smaller projects like our support of this training day can still have hugely promising outcomes for local cancer patients.
Thank you to all of our wonderful donors, fundraisers and volunteers for helping us support pioneering future cancer care in this way.