Ms Rachel Morrogh:

I thank the Chair and members of the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response for inviting the Irish Cancer Society here today. We wish to start by formally recording our appreciating for healthcare workers, support staff and anyone working involved in the delivery of healthcare during the pandemic which includes our own staff at the Irish Cancer Society. Their selflessness allowed for the ongoing provision of urgent cancer services in even the exponential phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. This included the Irish Cancer Society's night nursing team who provided nursing care in the home of patients who were at the end of their lives.

Our national support line was extended to seven days a week to assist with increased queries from anxious patients and family members. Our volunteer drivers continue to provide transport to people right across the country enabling patients to get to life-saving chemotherapy treatment.

Regarding the impact of Covid on cancer services, a few key points need to be addressed. On 27 March all non-essential surgery, screening and diagnostic procedures were postponed causing huge additional anxiety for patients. The impact of these postponements on cancer outcomes will take years to be fully uncovered. The immediate impact is that it has led to thousands of people not being screened, as well as growing waiting lists for cancer tests and treatment. There is little clarity in sight as to how these will be addressed. It is evident that without immediate action there will be excess and avoidable cancer deaths in the years to come as a result of people getting the care they need later than they should. An illustration of this is that we would expect approximately 450 cancers and 1,600 pre-cancers to have been detected in a typical four-month period if the screening services had been operating as normal. As such, we are very pleased that CervicalCheck has now resumed but disappointed that BowelScreen and BreastCheck may not return until autumn. In addition to screening we are concerned that there are still symptomatic patients who have not sought medical advice and as a result may experience a delayed diagnosis and access to treatment. If action is taken immediately then we might avoid the most dire predictions becoming a reality. Some of these are included in the submission we made to the committee.

As a first step the HSE must publish a recovery roadmap without delay and the Government needs to fully fund this before budget 2021. The crisis in cancer care pre-existed Covid-19 and the pandemic has just made things worse. Before Covid, targets in the national cancer strategy relating to timely access to diagnostics, surgery, radiotherapy, and the uptake of screening were all being missed. This is a direct consequence of consistent underfunding of a system that has been running to stand still in recent years and which has frequently budgeted in the knowledge that it will not meet demand. As such a return to normal is in fact undesirable for us. We want and need to do so much better. All of us - Government, Oireachtas Members, advocacy organisations and healthcare workers need to ensure that cancer services are fully restored in the short term. We need to take the opportunity to build back a better cancer system focused on the full delivery of the national cancer strategy. Rather than using a challenging environment as a reason not to improve services, we need to use it as the precise reason for building better, more equitable, high quality care that addresses the many needs of cancer patients in Ireland.