PATIENTS under the care of the radiotherapy team at Musgrove Park Hospital are now able to access surface guided radiotherapy treatment (SGRT) for the first time.

It follows a donation of more than £800,000 from the Somerset Unit for Radiotherapy Equipment (SURE) charity to buy and install this new system at the hospital’s Beacon Centre. 

SGRT uses sophisticated 3D camera technology to give therapeutic radiographers a real-time visualisation of the patient’s skin surface, monitoring physical movements and calculating any differences from the planned treatment position. This ensures the precision required for patient specific radiotherapy treatments.

It covers all types of cancer sites, with the exception of breast, and head and neck currently, but plans are in place to enable similar treatment of those cancers in the near future.

Jodie Thompson, a specialist practice therapeutic radiographer at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, explains: “Previously we’d have needed to physically tattoo the reference points onto the patient’s body to recreate the same position over the course of treatment, leaving them with a permanent reminder of their cancer.

“With this new equipment, we no longer need to tattoo patients and it offers a much less invasive approach to the process of obtaining the optimum treatment position.

“It has also reduced our manual handling and means we’re able to monitor our patients even more closely during their treatment, which gives us more information to make clinical judgements.”

Megan le Riche, also a specialist practice therapeutic radiographer at the trust, adds: “The system is synchronised with our treatment machines, so it interrupts the treatment if the patient moves, minimising risk to the patient, and for us as colleagues, our manual handling is greatly reduced.

“By using SGRT, our appointment times are quicker and as it’s available on every radiotherapy treatment machine, which means we will have the capacity to treat more patients in a single day.” 

Paul Alway, chair of SURE, which funded the SGRT system, explains how the charity became involved.

“Back in 2019 we worked with the trust to develop a vision of what SURE could fund over the next five years, and this was one of the projects that we were really keen to back,” he said. 

“As this equipment cost a lot of money, we initially thought that we’d need to run a standalone fundraising campaign, but in fact the efforts of our incredible supporters, particularly those leaving gifts in their wills, meant that we were able to fund it.

“In effect we’ve paid for all the equipment, as well as two years of maintenance and servicing, altogether totalling just over £809,000.”

Sarah Kushnaryova, the trust’s clinical lead for pretreatment, says that colleagues in the team have reported that they find it much easier to use and that they’ve picked up how the system works quickly. 

She said: “In fact, we’ve already been able to use it on a third of our patients, and the manufacturers were impressed at how quickly we’ve been able to move to tattoo-less treatments, which they hadn’t seen before.”