Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

One Irish person in three will develop invasive cancer, while one in four will die from it. Currently there are approximately 22,000 new cases and 7,500 die of the disease. We are aware that the number of cancer cases is expected to increase, largely as a result of population changes, from less than 14,000 in 2000 to over 28,000 in 2020. We must, therefore, ensure that the health system has the capacity to deal in a timely, quality assured fashion with the increasing numbers of patients presenting for diagnosis and treatment.

The House is well aware of the reviews into failures in cancer service provision, where due to lack of appropriate standards of care such as the absence of a multidisciplinary team to diagnose and determine treatment options, cancers were missed. We must change the system. We must provide quality assured cancer services and optimise survival rates, and that can only be done by realigning the current fragmented services and concentrating resources for diagnosis and initial treatment in the eight designated centres.

Local hospitals are a cornerstone of health care provision. They have huge, untapped potential in many cases, especially for day surgery and follow-up treatments. In cancer care, however, initial diagnosis by a multidisciplinary team, which has access to state-of-the-art diagnostic techniques and pathology, is the key to improving survival rates.

I strongly believe that the best way to improve cancer survival rates is to implement the national cancer control programme. I join the Minister in calling on this House to endorse the programme fully. We must concentrate on developing the designated specialist centres and stop arguing over local issues, be they political or medical.

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