Cancer patients’ transport costs would build treatment unit

HEALTH officials are spending more on transporting cancer patients from the South-East to Dublin for radiotherapy than it would cost to build a local treatment centre.

Ian Frazer, a consultant radiologist at St Luke’s Hospital in Dublin, said €1.8 million was spent each year bringing patients from the South-East to and from St Luke’s when €9m, or five year’s transport costs, would provide a permanent local unit.

Dr Frazer also said half of all terminally ill cancer patients from the region who need radiotherapy for the relief of pain or to control their symptoms were denied treatment in Dublin because they would not survive the strain of the daily 200-mile round trip. The alternative was to stay in Dublin for the five or six weeks of treatment, necessitating a stay in a B&B and a forced separation from family and other supports.

Either way, he said, the difficulty in co-ordinating appointments between a local hospital where patients received their diagnosis, surgery and follow-up care, and Dublin where they received radiotherapy, usually meant a delay of six weeks in arranging treatment.

For private patients the equivalent time was six hours.

Dr Frazer called for a unit to be built in Waterford City and blamed what he called “political inertia” for the Government’s failure to adequately address the issue despite the prolonged campaign by medics, patients and the general public in the area.

However, cancer specialists are split on the question of locating radiotherapy units outside the existing centres in Dublin, Cork and Galway and Dr Seamus O’Cathail, a consultant at University Hospital Cork, said he was not convinced of the arguments for building a centre in Waterford.

The two consultants clashed on RTE radio when Dr O’Cathail claimed patients from Waterford could travel to Cork for treatment instead and “be back for lunch“. He said the argument that people were being denied treatment did not hold up.

Local cancer services campaigner Jane Bailey of the Cancer Care Alliance said best international practice stipulated a maximum 60-minute journey to radiotherapy services and argued that patients from Waterford could not make the 90-mile trip to Cork in that time.

Dr O’Cathail said, if a 60-minute journey time was to be applied in all cases, there would have to be radiotherapy units all over the country, including places like Donegal where the numbers using it would in no way justify its provision.

“We have to approach this in a much more logistical and sensible fashion. These are very expensive facilities and if they are not used, their quality will deteriorate,” he said.

Dr O’Cathail is a member of an expert review group set up more than three years ago to make recommendations about the location of radiotherapy services around the country.

Their report, completed recently, is expected to say services should be concentrated in the existing three centres, but Dr O’Cathail said anyone who made assumptions before its publication was jumping the gun.

The Department of Health said afterwards that no date had been set for the publication of the report but it would be at least next month before its findings would be made public.