Mr. Steve Dempsey:

The Department and the Minister herself have given us a really firm commitment that cancer is and will continue to be a priority. When this new approach, the REOs, was first announced in a kind of secondary question as part of the budget press conference, it gave everyone who is closely involved with cancer a bit of a shock. That is what prompted us to engage with the Department. What we got back from it was very good. It said it is firmly committed to NCCP and how it is constituted and said that it would like to increase its ability. The devil is in the detail, however. It is very easy to say you are committed to the NCCP but to disempower or defang it because you are also committed to something slightly different. That would be really detrimental. Because of the NCCP's staff members' knowledge and skills in respect of centralisation and the protocols required to do things correctly, they are experts in their field.

Abnegating responsibility to make decisions in relation to cancer services to REOs and avoiding the experts in specific areas is a risk, as far as we are concerned.