Professor Maeve Lowery:

I want to come back to the comment on the comprehensive cancer centres and the importance of us working together in joining it up on an all-island basis. I take Professor Lawler’s point. Cancer is still the number one killer in Ireland, ahead of Covid and cardiovascular disease. We sometimes forget that and sometimes, unfortunately, our patients do not have such a strong voice. It is very important to make that point and make it clear it is the number one killer of Irish people, North and South.

To come back to Professor Gallagher's point, I am the academic director of the Trinity St. James's Cancer Institute, so I have an academic appointment at the university and a clinical appointment at St. James's, and I was part of the team that drove the accreditation process for the cancer centre at the Trinity St James's campus. What that meant was that we started at the beginning and we were the first accredited cancer centre, although I hope we will not be the only one. We drew those lines across the campus and asked how research can facilitate better clinical care pathways across all cancer types, and how it can facilitate better education for nursing staff or other front-line healthcare staff, and even those of us who are not on the front line. That was a difficult process. There was international benchmarking, of course, and we finally achieved our accreditation, but it does not stop there. We see ourselves as an exemplar of how we can achieve step one but our goal, across all of Ireland, is to improve cancer outcomes nationally and take our seat internationally at the table as a country, not just a centre, that contributes to the global problem of cancer care.

I am here because I want to work with all of my colleagues, North and South. I do not see how we could ever achieve the goal that we want to achieve for our patients alone. It will happen not in one hospital, one county or one academic institution, and we need to extend our hands across to each other. That is the only way any of us will achieve the goals we want to achieve.

I will take the opportunity to address the comment about nursing, which is very important because we do not have a nurse here today. Our nurses have been on the front line of cancer care and Covid care. Some of the nurses who work with me were seconded to intensive care in the middle of the first and second waves, and then went straight back down to the oncology day ward, which did not close. They were exhausted and stressed, but they kept showing up and they are still showing up. We have to realise that to maintain morale among our front-line healthcare staff across multiple disease types - cancer is just the one I work in - we have to provide a career pathway that is valuable, given the level of knowledge, skill, intelligence and achievement among our nurses but also our care attendants, physiotherapists, dietitians and all those who provide care in the hospital. Unless we make their job better by integrating research and education into their day job, we are not going to retain the best. It is not just about retention; it is about attracting the best, training them to be the best and making sure we keep them. That is across not just doctors, but across all the staff who work across our universities and, importantly, within our hospitals.