Ms Averil Power:

Covid-19 disrupted the whole cancer continuum from screening, diagnostics, treatment and in particular it led to those delayed diagnoses. It is also important to underscore the point that even before Covid-19, our services were creaking. Even before Covid-19, we were not seeing the investment we needed in the national cancer strategy just to meet existing services for a growing number of patients, as well as development funding for the future. As we said, this strategy was published in 2017 and at that point we were behind. We had improved from being the worst in class in European terms to catching up on the average. However, the latest data is from the European cancer inequalities register, in which data was published last year based on 2019. At that point, we had one of the highest rates of cancer incidence in Europe and the third highest mortality rate in western Europe. Even prior to Covid-19 there were massive issues in cancer services. Sometimes we feel that Covid-19 has been used as a kind of excuse for things not getting better in recent years but even prior to Covid-19, we were behind and badly needed investment to make sure that we could catch up and stay up with countries such as Finland, Spain and others that have far better outcomes than ours.