KIDNEY dialysis patients from north Oxfordshire have been promised they will no longer have to trek to Oxford for treatment from April.

Hospital bosses yesterday confirmed they plan to install five dialysis machines in a new £100,000 unit at Banbury’s Horton Hospital in just over three months.

The machines will serve 26 patients who currently face long journeys to Oxford’s Churchill Hospital. Two dialysis nurses will be recruited.

Banbury resident Steven Berry, 53, whose wife Miranda launched a campaign for the unit for north Oxfordshire, said he had travelled the equivalent of going to Australia and back five times during his 15 years visiting the Churchill.

Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday he gets up at 4.30am to be picked up by NHS volunteers at 5.45am for four hours of treatment, getting home at 2pm.

The Kenilworth Way resident said: “It’s brilliant. It’s excellent news.

“The hospital is only a 10-minute walk from where I live. I will be able to do things I couldn’t do before. I can spend time in the garden, I can go shopping.”

Mr Berry has nephrotic syndrome, a disease of the kidney where protein in the blood leaks into the urine, meaning the blood cannot regulate fluid throughout the body.

Dialysis machines take blood from the patient, filter out waste products and excess fluids and return it to the body.

Mrs Berry, his wife of 35 years, said: “It will give him more independence and free up more of his time.

“Travelling to oxford for treatment makes him very insecure because he is so far away from home and he is always on edge, he is always tense. This will make a huge difference.”

She said of her two-year campaign: “I saw the affect it was having on Steven, he was washed out and not very happy. I thought ‘he can’t go on like this’.”

The unit will take patients from Chipping Norton up to Brackley. Bicester patients will use Oxford.

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust said the service had “long been an aim”.

Horton director Mike Fleming said: “I’m delighted for local patients and their families who will benefit from this new unit. It is predicted that the need for dialysis services will expand in future and so we have planned the location so that it can be expanded further in the future if needed.”

Matron of dialysis units Allie Thornley said the existing service was “particularly hard” as the treatment is so tiring and time consuming.

She said: “It is always great when we are able to reduce the amount of time our patients spend travelling for their treatment.”

The machines will go in the former medical assessment unit, which moved in July to an enlarged facility in the Mulberry Ward as part of efforts to meet single sex accommodation rules.