THE widower of a popular nurse has spoken of how honoured she would have been to have a room named after her at a new breast unit.

Richard Heal contacted the Worcester News from his home in New Zealand to urge people to support the Worcestershire Breast Unit Campaign to build a new £2.5 million unit at Worcestershire Royal Hospital.

Your Worcester News has adopted the campaign to build the unit at 220 Newtown Road, near the Charles Hastings Education Centre to replace the existing facilities which are cramped, crowded and too spread out at the hospital.

Jacqui Heal, a mother of three and grandmother of seven, died aged 70 on July 23, 2007, with a brain tumour, shortly before the couple planned to emigrate to New Zealand.

Mr Heal, her husband of almost 45 years, said she would have been “over the moon” to have a room named after her at the unit, which will be a one-stop-shop for breast patients so they can assessed in less time in a far more pleasant environment.

The room named after Mrs Heal, who worked at the old Worcester Royal Infirmary in Castle Street, would be a room where patients with breast cancer could be told any bad news with their privacy and dignity preserved.

Mr Heal, a former teacher at Droitwich High School, said: “The space in which my wife had to work was very limited. There was no sort of pleasant room in which she or a surgeon could sit down with a woman, a husband or a relative to talk to them about a diagnosis.

“One of the things she always felt was that it would be nice to have a space or room, not on some hard chair but somewhere more comfortable so they were not going to be interrupted.

“Where my wife worked, there was no guarantee you wouldn’t be interrupted during an emotional and trying time. One of the things she hoped was that there would be this unit. She would have been over the moon about the campaign. She was an extremely caring person who was born to be a nurse.”

Mrs Heal formed the Worcester Breast Cancer Support Group to provide help, advice and support to people diagnosed with breast cancer.

The chairman of the group, Cherry Robinson, aged 65, of Osier Close, Worcester, who has battled breast cancer twice and is a model in the charity campaign’s fundraising calendar, said: “It would have meant so much to her. She was such a dedicated nurse.”