Wellington has a new weapon in its cancer wards. The first of two new $6 million radiation therapy machines has been installed at Wellington Regional Hospital, part of a national push to replace ageing equipment and lift the number of patients who can be treated close to home.
Health Minister Simeon Brown announced the installation on Saturday, saying the two linear accelerators bound for the hospital cost $12.6 million together once installation is counted. The first is now in place and a second will follow, replacing older machines that have reached the end of their working lives.
These are not machines you wheel in on a trolley. Brown said each one weighs several tonnes and has to be lowered into a purpose-built concrete bunker that shields the rest of the hospital from the radiation. “They’re very expensive machines, they weigh several tonnes, but it’s also about installing them and putting them in place,” he said, describing them as “incredibly difficult to install.”
A linear accelerator, usually shortened to LINAC, fires a tightly focused beam of high-energy radiation at a tumour. The aim is to destroy the cancer cells while sparing as much of the surrounding healthy tissue as possible. The newer machines do this far more precisely than the ones they replace. Brown said the replacements use camera-based surface guidance that watches where the patient is throughout the treatment, adjusting so the beam stays locked on target even as the person breathes or shifts slightly on the table.
Dr Melissa James of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists said the technology has moved a long way. The newer machines deliver a precise beam that can target tumours to within a millimetre, she said, killing the cancer while protecting the tissue around it. That accuracy matters most for tumours sitting close to organs that cannot take much radiation, where a stray millimetre can be the difference between a clean treatment and a nasty side effect.
Radiation therapy is one of the workhorses of cancer treatment. It is used against breast, prostate, lung, head and neck, and gynaecological cancers, among others, and it is also used to relieve pain in patients whose cancer has spread. Roughly one in two cancer patients will need radiation at some point in their care, which is why the machines that deliver it are counted among the most important pieces of equipment a hospital owns.
Wellington Regional Hospital already runs three of these machines. Between them they deliver about 16,000 treatments a year to more than 1,500 patients. A single course of radiation is usually spread over many short sessions across several weeks, which is why a relatively small number of patients accounts for so many individual treatments, and why losing a machine to age or breakdown quickly turns into longer waits.
That waiting is the part clinicians worry about most. Dr James said the country faces a growing mismatch between the number of people who could benefit from radiation therapy and the number who actually get it. “Year by year, we’re getting a widening gap of those who could benefit, but those who are actually missing out on radiation therapy,” she said. An ageing and growing population means more cancer diagnoses each year, and machines that spend part of their lives out of action for maintenance or replacement cannot keep pace unless the fleet is refreshed.
The Wellington installation is one piece of a wider replacement and expansion programme. Brown said new machines are also planned for South Auckland, Nelson and Burwood Hospital in Christchurch, with an installation at Hawke’s Bay Hospital expected within two years. Earlier this month a new cancer treatment machine began treating patients in Dunedin, part of the same effort to spread capacity around the country so fewer people have to travel long distances for weeks of daily appointments.
Geography is a real barrier in cancer care. Because radiation is delivered in many small doses rather than one big hit, a patient who lives far from a machine often faces an impossible choice between uprooting their life for a month or more to stay near a treatment centre, or going without. Putting machines in Nelson, Hawke’s Bay and the South Island alongside the big city hospitals is meant to shrink that distance for thousands of people.
For Wellington patients the immediate benefit is simpler. An old machine nearing the end of its life is being swapped for one that is more accurate and less likely to break down, and a second new unit is on the way behind it. That means steadier capacity, fewer treatments bumped by equipment faults, and a better chance that the beam lands exactly where the radiation oncologist intends.
None of it changes the underlying pressure. The number of New Zealanders diagnosed with cancer keeps climbing, and every new machine has to run hard just to hold the line. But a new LINAC in a Wellington bunker is a concrete, several-tonne sign that the fleet is being renewed, and for the patients who will lie under it in the months ahead, that is the machine that matters.
Have you or someone in your family been through radiation treatment in New Zealand? Tell us about your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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