Long-awaited children’s cancer move delayed again

The transfer of a children’s cancer service, ordered after years of safety concerns, has been delayed again and will not happen before 2028.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation Trust, which is due to run a new centralised paediatric principal treatment centre at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital in Lambeth, said essential approvals from the Building Safety Regulator were “taking more time than originally anticipated”.

When NHS England London confirmed the switch in 2024 – which will replace a current service led from the Royal Marsden site in Sutton – it said it would take place from “October 2026 at the earliest”.

That date later slipped to March 2027. Papers for the Royal Marsden FT’s board meeting on 30 September said GSTT now expected the transfer in “February or March 2028 at the earliest”.

The Marsden’s board was asked to endorse its position that the transfer “cannot safely proceed” without confirmed estates readiness, specialist air-filtered rooms, diagnostic arrangements, and funding for the workforce and the transition period. It was also asked to back continued escalation through NHSE London’s regional oversight board.

The PTC for children aged one to 15 in south London, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex is currently run from the Marsden’s Sutton site, which has no paediatric intensive care unit. Children who need intensive care are transferred to St George’s Hospital in Tooting. The Marsden’s papers said such transfers averaged seven a year.

A 2019 HSJ investigation revealed that multiple unpublished reviews had found the model unsatisfactory, and that it had been implicated in a series of incidents and child deaths. Concerns had been an “open secret” for almost a decade, one informed figure said at the time.

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Source: HSJ, 13 October 2026