‘Travel costs meant I had to work by my son’s hospital bed during cancer care’

It takes around 45 minutes to drive from the Berkshire town of Newbury north to Oxford – not a significant journey to see family and friends, or an occasional night out.

But for Phoebe Scaife two years ago, that trip meant so much more.

The city is home to the Oxford Children’s Hospital, where her eight-year-old son Barney was being treated for a tumour that had been found in his left lung.

It was initially thought that Barney had asthma, and after he became particularly sick at the start of 2024 he was treated for pneumonia. When his cough persisted, a scan revealed the horrifying truth.

This period of uncertainty resulted in many, many 45-minute drives from Newbury, where the family lives, to Oxford. Some of those journeys could take two hours.

It meant Phoebe and her husband Phil were forced to confront a brutal financial reality at a time when they wanted desperately to focus all their attention on their eldest son.

‘Just the increase in petrol that we were using,’ Phoebe recalled to Metro.

‘I remember one week he had a different appointment every day, so we were back and forth to the hospitals every day that week, and the increase in on top of everything else, it was a massive impact.’

Phoebe is a virtual assistant and her husband Phil is an assistant editor in film and TV. Both are self-employed, meaning ‘if you’re not working, you’re not earning’, Phoebe said.

There are no ideal circumstances for someone to be diagnosed with cancer. But when the patient is the child of self-employed parents who also have another younger son, the logistics can be particularly difficult.

‘You’d find yourself working by his bedside in hospital, doing additional hours at home, just to make sure that you were covering all bases – and then there’s the parking as well on top of the petrol,’ Phoebe said.

‘And it just starts adding up.’

With additional trips further afield – such as one to London to get a PET scan – the travel costs could be as much as £200 extra each month.

The charity Young Lives Vs Cancer provided a £100 grant to help with initial costs as Barney was beginning his treatment, a ‘massive help’ according to Phoebe.

But the pressures continued even after he had surgery to remove his lung, as his stitches needed to come out before a number of additional scans and check-ups.

Barney’s follow-up MRI scans took place every three months, then every six months, and his latest one was all clear.

Yesterday, the government announced it would be paying all the travel costs for families taking their children for cancer treatment, alleviating a major source of stress.

Phoebe said: ‘It just takes a little bit of pressure off of the situation that you’re just thrown into.

‘Just that bit of help that can ease something, because on top of worrying about everything your child’s going through, you’ve got that additional worry of money and how you’re going to be funding everything. So, just that little bit of help is massive.’

The move came ahead of the government’s publication of its National Cancer Plan marking World Cancer Day today.

It sets out plans for all cancer patients in the UK to be provided with a bespoke support plan to ‘cover the full impact of cancer on their life’.

Phoebe said one area that could be improved is support for the mental health of patients and their families.

She told Metro: ‘I was waiting nine months for counseling to help go through it, which I’m going through at the moment. There just wasn’t anything, especially anything local, that would support us.’

Health Secretary Wes Streeting said the new plan ‘means nobody gets handed a diagnosis and is then abandoned to navigate the system alone’.

He added: ‘This is care that actually fits around people’s lives, not the other way around. It’s the biggest shift in how we support cancer patients in a generation.’

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