Professor Riste?rd ? Laoide:

The shortage of radiation therapists is in the region of 30% to 35% of staffing at the moment. The first thing I did was to seek a derogation from the recruitment pause in the HSE for all staff related to radiation oncology, and that has been given.

The second thing is that the clinicians look at each patient individually for radiation oncology. We have a single KPI of approximately 15 days, which is quite a tight KPI compared with international standards but it is a broad one. Clinicians prioritise cases to ensure that those who need urgent care are dealt with. They prioritise patients on an individual basis. For prostate cancer, the requirement for rapid radiation therapy is not required in that scenario. Some places in Europe, for example, have a KPI for the provision of that therapy of up to 12 weeks. We have a blanket 15 days for everyone but other jurisdictions use different KPIs. Clinicians prioritise to ensure that all patients get their treatment within a clinically relevant timeframe in order that no patient suffers as a result of our lack of capacity.

The third thing we did was to ensure that overtime was available. The staff complement in the radiation oncology units is smaller and we have vacancies, but I pay tribute to the staff who are involved. They have committed themselves. Many of them do not want to do overtime but have done so to ensure we treat our patients.

Those actions relate to the acute and day-to-day issues. In the longer term, we are also looking at artificial intelligence, AI, which we hear a lot about in broad areas of healthcare. In radiation oncology, it is playing an a priori role, if I can say that. It is coming in very rapidly to facilitate processes such as contouring and autocontouring, which take a lot of time in the radiation process. We are today actively looking at bringing it in. We have a radiation oncology lead, Dr. Clare Faul, in the NCCP. She meets monthly with all the teams to look at how they are prioritising their patients. We are dealing directly with CORU at the moment. That is one of the issues. We want to bring people who are trained as radiation therapists back from abroad.

There was a discrepancy for example between the UK and ourselves, and that includes Northern Ireland, in the amount of training time required. We worked with Dr. Henry to average that up so that radiation therapists can come from the UK and work in Ireland. If they are short, we are also working with the Department of Health to get a special code for them so that they can actually be recruited into our system while they gain the extra requirements that are required for registration.