FAQs

We are asking for views on proposals to change some specialist cancer services currently provided at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre. The proposals aim to secure safe, sustainable specialist cancer care and increase the amount of care delivered closer to home where it is safe and practical.

We want to hear from patients, carers, local residents, community and voluntary groups, health and social care staff, and organisations that help check and monitor NHS services. The proposals affect people who live in Hertfordshire, parts of Bedfordshire, north west and north central London, East Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire.

The consultation runs from 19 January to 29 March 2026. Please respond by 29 March 2026 so your views can be included in the analysis.

There are several ways to take part during the consultation period:

• Complete the questionnaire online or on paper.

• Attend a public meeting, a focus group, or a public consultation hearing.

• Invite the team to speak at your community or patient group meeting.

• Send an individual or organisational response, including supporting evidence if you have it.

Yes. Paper copies will be available at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre and at local locations such as oncology outpatient departments and libraries where possible. You can also request a paper copy and we will send one to you.

Yes. If you need help filling in the questionnaire, or you need information in another language or format such as large print, braille or audio, please contact the team using the details above.

We will use responses to help with this consultation and to inform decision making.

If you fill in a paper questionnaire, it will be typed up within 30 days of the consultation ending and the paper copy will then be securely shredded.

Typed up and electronic responses will be kept for six years after a decision is made and then deleted securely.

If you share your contact details so we can keep you updated, they will be kept while engagement is active and deleted after two years of no activity.

Yes. No final decision has been taken. The consultation is a genuine opportunity to influence the final shape of the proposals, including mitigations that could make the changes work better for patients, carers, staff and communities.

Yes. The questionnaire includes space for other ideas and improvements. If you have evidence or links that support your suggestion, you can include them. Suggestions will be assessed against the same criteria used for the current options, including quality and safety, workforce, patient experience and inequalities.

The consultation document sets out proposals to:

• Reprovide some specialist cancer services in a new purpose built cancer centre next to Watford General Hospital.
• Deliver more diagnostics, appointments and treatments closer to home, including more local blood tests, more chemotherapy at home, and more use of virtual appointments where that works for patients.
• Consider an additional radiotherapy unit in either Luton or Stevenage, to reduce travel for people who live furthest away.

The new cancer centre would be run at Watford by University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH).

Mount Vernon Cancer Centre provides radiotherapy and a range of systemic treatments such as chemotherapy and immunotherapy for adults with most solid tumours.

The centre currently includes 22 inpatient beds, two treatment suites for systemic treatments, an outpatient department, and a radiotherapy centre with seven linear accelerators.

Some services are delivered through partnership arrangements. For example, brachytherapy theatre access is currently provided at Bishops Wood Hospital and patients are transferred between sites by patient transport.

There is no longer any haematology (blood cancer) service at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre because modern treatments require the support of critical care and other medical services that are not available on the current site.

University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) is a large specialist hospital that provides advanced cancer care and research.

UCLH has been involved in developing the proposals for reproviding services at Watford. Any management transfer and timelines would be subject to a sustainable plan for the future of the services.

The intention is that a stronger specialist partnership would increase access to research and clinical trials and strengthen specialist support for local hospitals.

• Full replacement and focussed development of a comprehensive Cancer Centre Hub better enables structured delivery of a networked model of care.  The choice of any ambulatory ‘spokes’ of this service can then be assessed based on population need, not a legacy location, and delivered in partnership with local referring hospitals.
• Full replacement, consolidation and clinical adjacencies ensures the clinical infrastructure to enable repatriation of specialist cancer services work from central London (notably UCLH)
• Access to medical and surgical specialty support benefits the full range of cancer care – inpatient and outpatient, and ensures certain patient groups are not disadvantaged. The increasing complexity of cancer care alongside the increasing requirement to manage cancer patients with additional co-morbidities make these clinical adjacencies increasingly critical to a specialist cancer centre.
• Critical mass and the specialist cancer workforce – delivery of the future clinical model hinges on the specialist cancer workforce; ensuring a model which is attractive to staff in terms of the clinical specialism, experience, training and development and research opportunities is key. Education and training opportunities are particularly enhanced by a comprehensive Cancer Centre hub.  In addition, to ensure it is possible to have the full range of very specialist multi-professional staff supporting complex cancer pathways, a certain size of service is needed.  
• Future-proofing – consolidation of services on a site adjacent to and connected to acute hospital facilities gives the best opportunity to future proof the service to respond to the as yet unknown future requirements of specialist cancer care.

If your question isn't answered here, you can ask your question using the 'Ask your questions' tab on the Get Involved page.

• There is limited support infrastructure on the existing site which limits the team’s ability to deliver complex oncology care. 
• Some newer treatments and research trials have high levels of toxicity. Without services such as high dependency or intensive care, patients will not have access to the latest treatments. Immunotherapies and other cancer treatments are becoming increasingly complex and there are already treatments that can’t take place at MVCC – this gap will increase in future. 
• As people live longer, more people with cancer are also living with other illnesses or conditions which require treatment alongside their cancer treatment. This cannot be done at MVCC.
• Staff have done a good job, despite the conditions, in providing high quality treatment and ensuring patient safety. Patient feedback regularly shows that most patients are happy with the services they receive. However, a more permanent solution needs to be found to ensure the sustainability of the services in the long term.
• Staff want to be able to treat more complex patients to develop their skills and become experts in their field and there is a risk that Mount Vernon will not be able to recruit and retain staff if a long term solution is not agreed.
• We want to organise services in ways that provide the best modern care for patients, including access to research trials and new technology and treatments, from good quality facilities.

No – the Programme Board honestly do not know what the recommendations will be in December and in March. Logically it makes sense that moving the hospital a long way will not be an option.

Yes – as long as we can get together the capital money we will need.

The current buildings are in a poor condition, with a significant backlog of maintenance issues. It is more cost effective to build a new hospital than bring the current buildings up to the necessary standard to provide safe care in a suitable environment. 

Simply improving the current buildings will not solve clinical issues such as a lack of intensive care beds.

Definitely not. There are no plans to move any patients to Central London unless they would need to go there anyway. In fact, UCLH would like to explore the possibility of some patients currently being treated in central London, being treated at Mount Vernon instead, if the right clinical facilities were available.

Patients care would become the responsibility of another cancer centre (such as London, Cambridge or Oxford) with satellite and outreach facilities as determined by that centre. This is not considered acceptable by East of England commissioners.

Mount Vernon needs access to a very small number of intensive care beds. Whilst most patients will not require intensive or critical care, it needs to be available in order for clinicians to be able to offer innovative, complex and rarer treatments. 

To build such a small intensive care unit would not be safe. It would be extremely difficult to staff and very expensive to run which would divert resources from elsewhere.

This would most likely mean re-locating all inpatient care and some associated services, including brachytherapy and radiotherapy to an acute site, with outpatients, radio pharmacy and diagnostics and potentially some chemotherapy remaining on site. Radiotherapy could possibly be moved in phases, with some being retained on the MVCC site until the Linear Accelerators reached the end of their life.

This would mean a relocation of all MVCC current services onto an acute site, with the possible addition of services patients currently have to travel into London for because of the limitations of the existing site and facilities.

This would mean a smaller specialist centre on an acute site, with a day hospital facility on another hospital site.

Satellite radiotherapy in North Hertfordshire or South Bedfordshire could be considered in most options. However, in the ambulatory hub option, it is likely to be necessary for the satellite radiotherapy centre and ambulatory hub to be on the same site, and the do minimum option may mean a new satellite radiotherapy service is developed only as the service moves off the MVCC site as the service is not large enough to spread across three sites.

At the moment we are developing options. As part of this we are working with local Integrated Care Systems, CCGs, other providers and Cancer Alliances, to understand the needs of the large population Mount Vernon cancer services serve, any variations in outcomes, access issues and more, as well as working on the feasibility of potential options.

Alongside this we need to agree how the new cancer centre will be paid for and where the money will come from. This capital funding is critical to moving the work forward.

Once we know this, we will be looking to run a formal 12-week public consultation. Only once the feedback from public consultation has been fully considered can a final decision be made. We are hoping the consultation will begin in the 2021/22 year so that a decision can be made in the first half of 2022.