Southend Hospital has become the first in the country to use state-of-the-art equipment for cancer treatment, thanks to £30,000 in donations.

Patients can now benefit from the Venezia applicator, which allows a high dose of radiotherapy to reach cancer which has spread away from the service and was previously inaccessible.

The new equipment has only been made possible through the fundraising efforts of several groups, including Rayleigh Lions who raised £3,000, New Leaf Distribution added another £5,000, the Pickering family raised £6,400 and the COPES (Cervical, Ovarian, Perineal, Endometrial Support) gynaecological support group added a further £16,500.

Previously, the hospital’s equipment only allowed the treatment to be delivered within a limited distance from the patient’s cervix. Some women with more advanced cervical cancers had to be referred to Mount Vernon Hospital in north London.

James Green, head of radiotherapy at Southend, said: “One of the things I find personally gratifying about this kind of treatment is that, after each time we do a scan on following days, we can see that the tumour has shrunk, and that’s quite a privilege as normally you see them getting better over a period of months and years.”