Ms Fiona Murphy:

On Senator Conway's final question as to what is next, it is absolutely around bowel cancer. I am not just saying that because it happens to be Bowel Cancer Awareness Month. I know that many people have received the packs and hopefully the committee members can put into their constituency newsletters a note of encouragement for people to take up the test which is already there.

We know that the bowel cancer test not only detects cancer early but also prevents cancer. By finding polyps on colonoscopy, we can prevent cancer happening in the future. The National Trauma Research Institute, NTRI, has already shown the evidence of the impact that our current bowel screening service has. That is very much where we want to go next. We bid for funding separately to the national cancer control programme, NCCP. We have been successful in getting funding for the breast expansion, the cervical expansion, so I am confident that we will get funding for the bowel expansion as well. As Dr. Henry said, it means the wider endoscopy services across the country need expanding. We do roughly 6,000 colonoscopies every year through the bowel screening programme but 100,000 colonoscopies are done through the national endoscopy programme. It needs to be looked at as part of the bigger and wider service around what needs to be expanded. I will be pushing to have any increase in funding to ourselves to go on expansion because of the impact bowel screening can make, and for anybody who is listening, the test is easy to do at home. It may not be the most pleasant topic but it is very easy to do and to send back in. We do what we call patient reported experience measures with patients where we ask the patients how that went for them. We get very positive feedback from the people who come through colonoscopy. It sometimes seems a bit scary but actually getting people through those tests can indeed save their lives.