Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The reference was to within the research system. I would be astounded if it was true. When Professor Hennessy refers to the healthcare system in this regard, is he including doctors? The third recommendation is to build patient and public trust by improving the use of cancer data. I read through this and it sounds like the sort of thing a PhD student or a team of boffins could knock together in about a week. I am probably oversimplifying somewhat but we are talking about getting a bunch of existing datasets and doing clever things with the data. Is that not something that could be knocked together very quickly? There would be a need to hire very clever people. Ultimately, however, the work involved would not appear to be difficult.

I was really taken by the Irish Cancer Society stating that six of the seven targets for implementation have been missed. Why is that and what do its representatives think is going on? We will shortly be talking to some of the people whose job it is to ensure implementation. It is very stark that the HSE's 2019 service plan explicitly states that the NCCP allocation for this year will not enable the service to match referral demands. That is pretty terrifying if we are saying it in our own delivery programme. Why is that the case? What does the Irish Cancer Society identify as the biggest opportunity? It has listed about seven or eight things it would like to see but if there was one thing we could sort, what would be the most useful?

My final question to Cancer Trials Ireland relates to what Deputy Brassil stated. We need to fund cancer trials. My guess is that the per-patient cost is a lot greater than the cost providing them with approved drugs, although I know there are wildly different costs involved. Could we have a sense in basic terms of how many patients we could treat with existing drugs for every patient on a trial? I know it is a huge range but what would be the average?