Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Deputy. The two strategies have changed the landscape for people who are diagnosed with cancer. Today nearly 250,000 people in Ireland are living with or beyond cancer, 50% more than a decade ago. The evidence is that the chances of survival for more than five years for someone diagnosed with cancer in the 1990s was considerably less than what it is now. This is on foot of the extraordinary work done by clinicians and researchers, and the way in which cancer services are delivered. This has enabled a very considerable shift. Nevertheless, we know we will have more and more people diagnosed with cancer in the years to come. This is because we are living longer and we are diagnosing better, and we need to make sure that the services are available for them, for all of us and for everybody we represent who will face a cancer challenge at some point in their lives, particularly as we live longer.

The Deputy is right to identify the strengths in some of the KPIs as well as the slippages in them. I certainly want to highlight both of these things. One of the reasons we are changing to this regional funding model is so we can have better regional transparency. It is correct that public representatives have the ability to see this regional variation and that there is a pressure linked to the performance framework in relation to the regions achieving the best performance and matching the best performance around the country.

The cancer strategy had 52 recommendations, 43 of which have been delivered or continue to be in the process of being delivered, as will be the case to the end of the strategy. We want to reflect on and evaluate the strategy and its efficacy as we develop a new strategy. What will be very interesting, and where we are open to every suggestion, is how much the world has changed in terms of research and the role AI can play. Some of the extraordinary research being done in Galway, for example, is where they have learned to manipulate cancer cells against themselves and how this works. Treatment has become so individual and personalised. The next cancer strategy can be genuinely ambitious and different again, and I welcome every suggestion relating to it.

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