Since December 2017, six public health patients have undergone brain stereotactic treatment free of charge thanks to the charitable work of the St George’s Cancer Institute, St George’s Hospital and St George’s Cancer Care Centre. The treatment is very complex and would not have been available to patients through the public system due to resourcing issues.
The next phase of the stereotactic programme will be the introduction of spinal stereotactic treatments. Part of this requires the purchase of a new piece of equipment called a HexaPOD™couch. The HexaPOD system is a fully robotic patient positioning system with six degrees of freedom to correct for any misalignments detected by the imaging done before treatment each day. This allows treatment of much smaller lesions close to the spinal cord and other critical structures. The purchase of this has been facilitated by the St Georges Cancer Institute Equipment Trust.
Education is a key component to the introduction of any new technology and we have a team heading to Toronto Canada in May this year to learn from world leaders in the field of Spinal Stereotactic radiation treatment.
We hope to be able to provide these treatments from July 2018.
