Our Story
The Fortuneswell Cancer Unit came into being in a cramped and dingy area at the top of the, then new, Dorset County Hospital. Even here patients were very grateful for the support they received and started to make donations in the hope of improving the facilities which were becoming increasingly inadequate due to advances in cancer treatments and rising numbers of patients being treated.
A group of like- minded people comprising of staff and patients got together and the West Dorset Chemotherapy Unit Support Group was formed. In 1998 it was felt that a charitable trust, independent of hospital managers, would be the most effective mechanism to channel donated funds into service improvements and so the Fortuneswell Cancer Trust was established.
The remit of the Trust was drawn up simply, and was, and still is “to assist cancer sufferers in Dorset”.
We do this mainly, but not exclusively, by working to improve cancer facilities at Dorset County Hospital. We have no paid staff – the Trust is run by Trustees and a Committee, with other volunteers helping out where necessary. Our running costs are minimal so donations really do help cancer patients locally and, since its inception in 1998, the Trust has received several hundreds of thousands of pounds from donors, fundraisers and from legacies and funeral collections as well as through its own fundraising events.
From the outset, the primary goal was to set up a dedicated cancer centre in or near Dorset County Hospital. This proved to be more difficult than first imagined and so an incremental approach was adopted. The Trust felt that the chemotherapy outpatient facilities were in greatest need of improvement and so that is where they started.
In 2005, the first major goal was achieved and the Trust donated £150,000 to help enable the hospital to open a new patient friendly chemotherapy and haematology outpatient department, “The Fortuneswell Unit”
This really was a great success and dramatic change and immediately raised the profile of the Trust, giving a major boost to fundraising as people saw that charitable funding really could enhance what the NHS can offer. However, it took until 2012 to achieve the next step, which was a dedicated cancer ward at the hospital to provide a safety net to cancer patients needing specialised nursing skills quickly. The next large project was the donation of £65,000 to help convert an area of the ward to an isolation suite allowing patients with more difficult types of leukaemia to be treated.
Following on from this came plans for a radiotherapy unit and new Oncology outpatients’ department, now known as the Robert White Centre. This new Radiotherapy Unit would act as a satellite centre under the umbrella of the Dorset Cancer Centre, enabling a far higher proportion of cancer patients to have all their treatment in Dorchester and significantly reduce the journey time that people in the north, south and west of the county faced in travelling to Poole. The Trust were delighted to be able to donate £358,000 towards this project, which eventually opened in December 2018. Now we seem to have almost come full circle, with the Fortuneswell Unit getting to the stage where it needed renovating and updating, and a full refurbishment project is currently underway. We have donated £100.000 towards this venture and pledged a further £50,000 towards the updating of the Unit’s pharmacy department.
And so, we have moved a long way down the road towards our dedicated cancer centre and the Fortuneswell Cancer Unit is becoming better known, as more and more people are treated there.
It is, however, not all about contributing to major projects at Dorset County Hospital. In addition, we continue to:
- fund smaller projects such as the Bridport Outreach Department allowing patients to receive their chemotherapy treatment nearer their home,
- support the education of clinical staff by funding them to attend study days, training courses and conferences to keep knowledge and skills up to date, allowing patients to get the best care possible,
- help with various specialised items of medical equipment, which is very expensive, that, although we may like to think the NHS could provide, the reality simply is that the money is not always there. Items such as reclining chairs for patients receiving chemotherapy, educational equipment and recently an endoscope allowing the respiratory team to treat patients at DCH rather than them having to travel to Southampton, are to name a few of the items we have provided,
- fund the provision of reflexology to patients having chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Like many charities, we currently have more issues with fundraising than we did a few years ago. However, there are still a lot of very kind people who commit to fundraising events for us or make individual donations and we do still get the occasional legacy.
It is only through the generosity of donors and the work of fundraisers that we are able to achieve our aims and keep to that simple remit “to assist cancer sufferers in Dorset” and we thank you all for everything that you do to help us.
Robert White Therapy Centre