A £3.5 million exercise and wellbeing centre is to open in Harrogate in autumn.

The Yorkshire Cancer Research Centre at Hornbeam Park will offer free, personalised fitness, nutrition and wellbeing support to people with cancer. It aims to help patients prepare for treatment and recover better.

The building will incorporate a café, shop and donation centre and will also become Yorkshire Cancer Research’s new head office. The charity will relocate from its premises at Grove Park Court in Harrogate.

It currently has 70 staff, including those at its seven shops, and expects to have 100 by March next year, partly due to the new centre, which will create 10 new jobs and 40 volunteering opportunities.

Its shop sites include Harrogate, Ripon and Knaresborough.

People will be able to self-refer to the exercise centre and visit for free, although they will need to sign-up and book.

Most users are expected to come from within 15 miles of Hornbeam Park and up to 1,500 people are expected to use the service in its first three years.

The gym will offer one-to-one support

The charity is recruiting fitness instructors with specialist cancer knowledge. Many sessions will be one-to-one.

Everything people do at the centre will be analysed and used to improve understanding of exercise as a treatment for cancer patients.

Yorkshire Cancer Research plans to open at least four new fitness and wellbeing centres across the region in the next 10 years.

Dr Kathryn Scott, chief executive at Yorkshire Cancer Research, said:

“Yorkshire will be at the forefront of exercise as a treatment” and the centre would “inform future cancer treatment in the UK and elsewhere in the world”.

Evidence shows that exercise can increase the success of cancer treatment, reduce side effects and speed up recovery, as well as improving life expectancy.

The programme builds on the charity’s Active Together service in Sheffield, which was launched in February 2022, in partnership with Sheffield Hallam University’s Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. So far it has helped more than 370 people with cancer.

Yorkshire Cancer Research will relocate from its current site at Grove Park Court in Harrogate.

Dr Scott said:

“Despite clear evidence that being physically active is safe and has a positive effect for people with cancer, exercise services are not routinely available and most patients are not as active as they could be following a diagnosis.

“Our long-term goal is for these programmes to become a standard part of care embedded in and delivered by the NHS across Yorkshire and beyond.”

It’s a little known fact that 2,000 more people die of cancer each year in Yorkshire than the national average.

More smoking, less exercise, pockets of deprivation and variable screening rates are among the causes.

Dr Kathyrn Scott, chief executive of Harrogate-based Yorkshire Cancer Research, is leading the fightback:

“We currently have 14,000 deaths a year. It could be 12,000 if we just had better funding and infrastructure.

“”We’ve got this hidden tragedy happening in Yorkshire and we are determined to change it.”

Dr Scott, a scientist, joined Yorkshire Cancer Research in 2008 as an office junior and worked her way up to chief executive four years ago. She’s far from the archetypal scientist, laughing a lot and joking that “I actually like people”.

Yorkshire Cancer Research, which is the largest voluntary organisation in the Harrogate district, has had remarkable financial success in recent years: income has soared from £6.2 million in 2016 to £18.7 million in 2020 and is expected to increase again this year.

By contrast, covid has decimated many charities’ finances — cutting donations, cancelling fundraising events and closing charity shops.

New Harrogate headquarters with wellbeing centre

Yorkshire Cancer Research’s coffers are bearing the fruits of royalties from a drug called Lynparza that it funded Sheffield University to develop.

Royalty income alone increased from £6.7 million in 2019 to £12 million in 2020, which is enabling the charity to press ahead with plans to expand and tackle cancer.

It has opened more shops, employed more staff and is set to announce a move to new Harrogate headquarters, which will include a wellbeing centre where people with cancer can exercise as part of their recovery.

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Wellbeing has become a major focus of the charity’s work and it hopes to open similar exercise facilities across Yorkshire. Dr Scott says:

“For years people with cancer were told to rest, sit down and have a cup of tea and although there’s still a place for that you need to exercise. It can halve the chances of some some cancers coming back.”

The charity, which is currently based at Grove Park Court, expects to reveal its new headquarters in autumn. Dr Scott says:

“We’ve found the perfect site but it’s definitely a secret for now.”

Recruiting more staff and opening more shops

The number of staff has grown from about 40 when Dr Scott took charge to 53 now and is expected to rise to 65. From September, it will trial a hybrid system whereby employees work two-thirds of the week in the office and one-third from home.

The charity, which is the largest regional cancer research charity in England, opened its fourth charity shop in Ripon this year and hopes to have 20 shops within five years.

The charity’s strong financial position has also ensured it hasn’t had to cut funding to research programmes — unlike some other cancer charities during covid. It funds £10 million of cancer research each year.

But for all its success, Dr Scott admits Yorkshire Cancer Research’s overarching ambition to save 2,000 Yorkshire lives by 2025 might not happen on schedule because of the wider impact of covid on cancer services.

Hospital services have been scaled back and people who have discovered symptoms, such as blood in their poo, have felt less inclined to bother their GPs.

But she says people in the Harrogate district have been luckier than most in Yorkshire:

“Harrogate District Hospital has been one of the more resilient hospitals in the sense that it has got a lot of services up and running again quickly. It feels like it’s been an agile organisation.”

Dr Scott, who was born and bred in Bradford but has lived in Harrogate for about 20 years, is a keen cyclist who nominates Norwood Edge and Greenhow Hill as among her favourite rides.

They’re two of the most notorious climbs in the area — Dr Scott will be hoping the charity can continue to avoid such uphill struggles in the years ahead.

Several hundred people in Yorkshire have missed potentially life-saving early cancer diagnosis because of covid, according to a Harrogate-based research charity.

Dr Kathryn Scott, chief executive of Yorkshire Cancer Research, gave the figure in an interview with the Stray Ferret.

The NHS halted screenings in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Scott said:

“We have lost some opportunities to find early cancers. People were also very nervous to go to the doctors. Then the people that do go have delays in diagnosis and treatment.

“The NHS tried innovative ways to get around that. But it is still a sad fact that we think several hundred people have missed out on early diagnosis in Yorkshire.”

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She added that when people miss out on early diagnosis they often have to go through more invasive treatments and have a worse chance of survival.

Dr Scott spoke to us after the publication of the charity’s annual accounts for the year ending 31 March 2020, which showed total income had increased from £12.8 million to £18.7 million.

Royalty income accounted for £12 million – up from £6.7 million – of this.

The charity, however, is expecting its next accounts to be more challenging because of covid, with fundraising income likely to be down by more than £1 million.

£8.3 million for new cancer research

To combat what Dr Scott sees as a “big hill to climb” with cancer, the charity is pumping another £8.3 million into new research.

Of this sum, £3.4 million will be used to fund research into whether chemotherapy before surgery in bowel cancer patients improves survival rates.

Other projects it funds will look into ways to use medication to slow the spread of prostate cancer, urine tests to detect bladder cancer and whether vaping products can help those with mental illness quit smoking.

How coronavirus vaccine push can help cancer research

There has been much excitement about the development of coronavirus vaccines with efficacy of up to 95%.

Dr Scott hopes the development of new technologies, such as synthetic DNA-based vaccines, could be adapted to improve cancer treatments. She said:

“One of the benefits of the way they have run the clinical trials is the new technology and the new techniques they’re using in those trials.

“It really compresses the time and so absolutely in the future, fingers crossed, we can get cancer treatments and therapies through that pipeline faster.”

Although the pandemic is likely to hit Yorkshire Cancer Research hard financially, it believes its future is bright, and that it will be able to continue with its aim of helping 2,000 more people survive cancer every year in Yorkshire.