Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Deputy and again welcome him back. I welcome the fact he has raised issues relating to cancer services and the national cancer strategy. It is important just to take a step back and look at the progress we have made over many years since the national cancer strategy was introduced. Over 65% of patients live for five years after a cancer diagnosis, compared with 43% in the 1990s. A lot of the difficult reforms that were introduced by Ministers in previous years around the centralisation of particular services and hubs have yielded much greater outcomes for citizens across the country. Like the Deputy, I commend all the workers across our hospital system who provide that daily care, compassion and support for people as they go through their treatment journey.

We have tried in recent years to build and resource a public health system that responds to the needs from a workforce perspective. That is why in the past five years we have nearly 30,000 additional healthcare workers in terms of whole-time equivalents working in our public health system to support and rapidly respond to diagnoses or particular incidents as they arise from cancer and a lot of other health perspectives. Next year, we will have an allocation of over €27 billion in terms of the overall allocation to the Department of Health.

The Deputy asked specifically about radiation oncology, which I will respond to. In my negotiations and engagement with the Minister, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, we will have over €9 billion of capital in our health system over the next five years. That is a record level. The Minister is now developing a sectoral investment plan, working with the HSE on the capital needs in our system. Some of that will relate to radiation oncology or treatment interventions around replacing existing equipment. Others will obviously relate to new beds and building bed capacity across our system. As a Government, we have prioritised funding our health system, funding more workers and beds in our health system and also funding the technological improvements that I think will yield greater improvements in life expectancy. That is why we are taking digital health seriously and prioritising that from a capital perspective over the next five years. I will ask the Minister to respond in time to the Deputy's specific question and take a note of the work that is happening and the capital plans for the next five years. However, successive Governments have resourced and significantly reformed our health system and its cancer treatment. We are seeing the positive outputs from that due to the great work of the people the Deputy mentioned.

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