Dr. Triona McCarthy:

From a population perspective, we have had a 1 million-plus growth in the population size overall since the establishment of the cancer control programme. It was particularly in the over-65s, where that has been an the 80% growth. As well as that, while incidence rates may be decreasing in many cases, the numbers of people we have to treat needs to be accounted for. The complexity of treatment also has to be taken into consideration. It is important to emphasise it not just the population. Particularly when we are looking at chemotherapy or systemic treatments, when we look at our cancer register data we are looking at the numbers of people who are diagnosed with cancer. Thankfully, 220,000 people are living with cancer but many of those people are being treated again and again for recurrences and surviving. That complexity is being factored into the capacity needed in that part of the system as well.