Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 October 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Current Issues Relating to Health Services for Cancer: Discussion

2:00 am

Mr. Steve Dempsey:

As everyone has said, a lot of issues relate to capacity across the entire healthcare system. In some ways, the Danish example is an unfair comparison because it has electronic health records. It starts at a different level from us. A lot of baseline analysis would be required, but electronic health records would be great start. We called in our pre-budget submission for a review of all the infrastructure across the country to understand the infrastructural deficit we currently face. We have not seen the kind of baseline work required. The figures we have been talking about around the budget relate to our understanding of how the budget should have ramped up over the lifetime of this strategy. I think we did a back-of-the-envelope analysis that it is about €80 million down from where it should have been. We were calling for at least €20 million. In some instances, you can call for it to be adequately funded but it would not be possible to fully spend all that money because we do not have the staff to get people on board and we do not necessarily have the capacity elsewhere to facilitate what is required to do that.

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