Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

The more appropriate term for the new centres is "specialist centres" because the use of the word "excellence" implies we do not have excellence. We have an excellent breast surgeon — Dr. O'Hanrahan — in Sligo General Hospital. All our national experts, from Professor Niall O'Higgins down, as well as a large body of international evidence — I understand 250 medical journals are published on cancer — suggest that volume equals quality. It is not simply a matter of a single physician, whether a surgeon, a pathologist who has a specialty or a radiologist, but of numbers of people working together. All the evidence suggests that one's chances improve by more than 20% when one is treated in these centres.

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