Ms Averil Power:

On the financial impact, investment in cancer care saves money. Cancer that is diagnosed early is much cheaper to treat. The single biggest thing that would save lives would be the earlier diagnosis of all cancers. That is a particular challenge, and it is a greater challenge with some cancers than others. There are significant differentials. While our overall survival rate is now 65%, according to the latest figures available, it is 90% for both breast and prostate cancers, thankfully. There is a much lower survival rate for cancers such as those affecting the lung, brain and pancreas. Recommendations have been made in this regard. For example, lung screening has now been recommended by the EU. Investing in this in Ireland would help to pick up lung cancer, our deadliest cancer and the one that kills the most people here. If we invested in this area and in picking up lung cancers earlier, it could have a massive impact on improving survival outcomes for one of our cancers with a poorer prognosis. It is a question of investing in diagnostics overall and also of focusing on cancers with particularly poor outcomes, including those that tend to be picked up in EDs, for example.

A quarter of gastrointestinal cancers are diagnosed in emergency departments, which is shocking. Part of that is because people are not aware of the symptoms until they are in pain or they think it is IBS or other stomach discomfort and cancer is not something that comes to mind. Some cancers are still harder to pick up early but the more we can invest in early diagnosis and access to testing and screening as early as possible, the better.