The last few days have seen many news reports of poor standards at Mount Vernon, one of the country's key cancer care centres. I have not been able to find the NHS report online, only the news reports of it, so it's possible the news reporting doesn't accurately reflect the real NHS report. The news reports claim the NHS report says it is beyond fixing and must be closed.
As a recent patient there, I am somewhat shocked for two reasons; to hear a hospital is in such a bad state, and because it doesn't at all reflect my experience over the couple of months I had treatments there. The comments about the dilapidated state of some of the buildings are true in places. The hospital predates WWI as a TB hospital, and became a hospital for treating WWI troops - many of those buildings are still in use and include the two in-patient cancer wards (in which I spent 3 days). However, the building containing most of the linear accelerators is only about 10 years old, and most of the linear accelerators I was treated on where one or two years old, although I had a few sessions on a 10 year old one. All of them were IG-IMRT and run in Image Guided mode every time (unlike many centres which only do that the first few treatments, and then once a week), and there were 7 linear accelerators used for prostate, bowel, breast, head/neck, etc, and some other linear accelerators used for more specialist treatments including cyberknife stereotactic radiotherapy. They also have a HDR Brachytherapy suite there, something they've been specialising in since 1996, and it's their long term survival results which have made this procedure more popular just recently, a reflection of them also being a significant research and teaching hospital.
The staff have been wonderful throughout. There's a very pro-active holistic care program which runs along with your treatment, something that's missing from many other hospitals.
Obviously, there are many parts of the hospital I don't know and the palliative care suite came in for particular criticism.