Professor Risteárd Ó Laoide:

On funding, a lot of the projects we run are continuous. Somebody mentioned recurrent predictable funding. That is a really critical issue for the roll-out of strategies. I hope that will be part of the next strategy. It is like trying to build a house in that you know where you are starting and where you want to get to but it will take a number of years. It also allows you to make judicious use of the resources as well, so you do not have to spend it this year and you can spend it over a number of years. For example, we have the acute haematology oncology nursing service which is being set up. That is a super service. I should congratulate the NCCP. What that does is it stops the patients with cancer who have acute symptoms going into casualty and being seen. It is an acute nursing service that stops that. The people at the front line have been rolling this out in Mr. Canavan's area and lots of other areas. It is a very good service, but it currently operates from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. To roll that out on an 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. basis, or 24-7, requires us to have additional funding. With predictable funding, we would know when and how we would roll that out.

Another example is stratified self-managed follow-up, which we do for patients. That is empowering the patients to take charge of their own follow-up, while ensuring they have close contact with the hospital, that there is somebody identified in the hospital who can deal with them and that they know what their red flag symptoms are and how to get quick access to diagnostics, etc. Again, we have rolled that out for some of the tumour types, like prostate, but we want to roll it out for breast tumours.

Those systems will have a knock-on effect on our acute hospital system, which is currently overburdened. The answer to the Deputy's question is we need money to keep those projects rolling and make sure they are rolled out completely. The national cancer information system is another one of them. Obviously, funding is required as well to help with the capacity constraints members have heard about today from us and from the Irish Cancer Society in regard to diagnostics and day ward capacity. To increase day bays and beds, increased funding is needed.