My name's Graham Cox, I'm an Ear Nose and Throat surgeon working here in Oxford, and have a major interest in head and neck surgery and head and neck cancer surgery in particular.

Head and neck cancer is actually quite a rare cancer, but here we see about 250 new patients each year with various forms of head and neck cancer and so we're one of the bigger departments in the UK. We have quite a wide catchment area, because there's been a process of centralising head and neck cancer treatment into major centres, so our patients come from Wiltshire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, Buckinghamshire as well as Oxfordshire.

Within the team there are three ENT surgeons, all with overlapping interests in head and neck cancer, two maxillofacial surgeons who again have overlapping interests, two plastic surgeons and three clinical oncologists, or specialists in cancer medicine. So it's a big team, where it's necessary we involve the neurosurgeons or the upper oesophageal surgeons, where the disease overlaps those particular boundaries; so if a patient needs a tumour treated from their skull base our neurosurgeons will be involved, and likewise if the tumour in their throat involves the gullet our oesophageal surgeons will be involved, so there's a lot of collaborative working to try and produce the best treatment available for each patient.

The team meets every week where we discuss all new patients, we look at their imaging, their scans that come with them, if they need new scans we organise those here, their biopsy results are also looked at by our team of pathologists here, so that we're confident that we can offer the best package of treatment for each patient.

Bringing the service all onto the same site in the Churchill Cancer Centre I think is a very exciting development. It's almost unique in the UK and it mirrors the arrangements that we find in Northern Europe and North America, of having proper integration of all the surgeons, the clinical oncologists, the medical oncologists, the cancer specialists if you like, together with the research facilities of the University, and that's a very exciting prospect.