BURNHAM’S MP Tessa Munt has triumphed in her four-year long battle to get the Govenment to invest £5million a year in cutting edge ‘cyberknife’ cancer treatment.

Ms Munt joined forces with rugby legend Lawrence Dallaglio and senior cancer consultant from the Royal Marsden Hospital, Nick van As in a campaign to improve access to advanced stereotactic radiotherapy (SABR) for cancer patients, particularly those in the South West where access is non-existent.

Together the trio successfully lobbied the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, met the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, and last month spoke with the chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, to demand he take action.

Last Friday the years of hard work paid off when NHS England announced that from April this year it would fund a series of new projects that will give access to SABR for patients with a range of cancers.

Four years ago, the NHS’s National Radiotherapy Implementation Group (NRIG) produced a widely supported plan that would allow cancer patients in England to be treated with SABR.

Tessa said: “NRIG was ignored and our country fell behind the rest of the developed world in using SABR to cure cancer.

“As a result many cancer patients, like 47-year-old Kerry Dunn from Sandford in Somerset, died of cancer after being refused ‘cyberknife’ funding.

“I’ve asked more than 300 Parliamentary Questions on this issue and at times it has felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall; it was very frustrating but I knew I was right.

“Radiotherapy is the way forward, it’s less intrusive, more effective and much cheaper, yet NHS England continued to prioritise spending on expensive drugs.

“It will enable us to more than treble the number of cancers treated.

“It will prevent many from suffering unduly, give hope to a great many more and put an end to unnecessary deaths.

“This agreement means that from April, funding for patients with secondary cancer, many different primary cancers will be available.”

Co-campaigner Lawrence Dallaglio was inspired to join the fight after his mother Eileen died of cancer in 2008.

He paid tribute to Tessa’s work and said: “It was a privilege to work with Tessa to achieve this important breakthrough.

“She is tenacious and has worked tirelessly to highlight the lack of access to SABR.”