Report calls for regional teams to run cancer services

REGIONAL TEAMS should be given a mandate by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to develop and run cancer services in their own areas and they should be provided with ring-fenced budgets to do the job, according to a report published yesterday.

The report, launched by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and the State's interim director of cancer control Prof Tom Keane, said the current lack of comprehensive cancer care here "leads to the disruption of treatment schedules and many patients receive sub-optimal therapy".

It says that under the current system, resources are diluted across hospitals.

Some sites have state-of-the-art imaging services but inadequate treatment facilities while others have state-of-the-art treatment but "unacceptable waiting lists for scans".

It also says radiotherapy services are "polarised" at opposite ends of the country and some patients have no access to medical oncology services at all. However, it says if hospitals were organised in regional networks, as is envisaged under the national cancer strategy, patients would be able to access all elements of cancer treatment within a reasonable commute of their homes.

The report looks at how one such network has been successfully operating for the past five years across seven institutions in the eastern region, including St James's, Tallaght, Crumlin, Naas, Peamount and the Coombe hospitals as well as Our Lady's Hospice in Harold's Cross, serving a population of 500,000 people.

It put in place a system for auditing outcomes as well as guidelines for GPs referring patients with suspected cancers.

Prof Keane said he believed the model outlined in the report was one which could be duplicated around the State. He believed the over-centralisation of cancer services would not work.

At the publication of the report, Mr Ahern said more than 22,000 cases of cancer are diagnosed each year and more than 7,000 people die from the disease, but significant progress had been made in recent years and survival rates had been improving.

Prof Keane confirmed the budget for cancer care in the State was still in the process of being identified so it could be transferred to him. "There's a huge amount of work to transfer what amounts to probably something in the order of 20 per cent of the HSE's budget. We are making very good progress on the core components," he said.

He refused to comment on the specifics of the report into the misdiagnosis of breast cancer patient Rebecca O'Malley other than to say there had been "some unfortunate incidents" and he hoped lessons would be learned.

Ms O'Malley yesterday criticised as "a grotesque example of spin" comments made by HSE chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm on Friday when he said the good news from the investigation into her misdiagnosis was that the pathologist who recorded her biopsy as benign, when it was in fact malignant, had only missed one diagnosis out of a huge number.

© 2008 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times