Pandemic 'particularly difficult' for people with cancer, Oireachtas committee to hear

About 42,000 Irish women are referred to symptomatic breast disease clinics each year, with about 2,500 to 3,000 of those likely to receive a subsequent diagnosis of breast cancer. File picture: PA 

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a “particularly difficult” time for people in Ireland living with cancer, the HSE’s national director for cancer services will tell an Oireachtas committee on Tuesday.

About 300,000 cancer screenings were delayed last year as a result of the impact of Covid-19 after testing programmes were suspended in March 2020.

Professor Risteárd Ó Laoide, director of the HSE’s national cancer control programme, is expected to tell the Oireachtas Health Committee on Tuesday – which is meeting to discuss the BreastCheck screening programme – that despite the onset of Covid-19, “symptomatic breast service continued throughout the pandemic”.

“Furthermore the symptomatic breast service was significantly bolstered during this time through resources from temporarily paused screening services being diverted into symptomatic services,” he is expected to say, with the effect that urgent at-risk patients “were seen, diagnosed and treated quickly”.

Prof Ó Laoide will tell the committee, however, that the cyber attack on the HSE’s systems in May of this year “had a particularly devastating effect on the continuity of cancer services”.

'Innovative approaches'

He will say devastation was mitigated to an extent by the “innovative approaches” employed by staff as the executive struggled to recover from the ransomware attack which saw computer systems across the health service compromised.

Such approaches included “extra evening and weekend clinics, extended working days, re-fitting of mobile screening units, pioneering changes to radiotherapy fractionation, virtual clinics, insourcing and outsourcing and rapid development of clinical guidelines”, the professor is expected to tell the committee.

People with breast cancer account for just under a quarter (23%) of patients living with or beyond cancer in Ireland. BreastCheck itself was suspended from March until October of 2020 due to the initial lockdowns.

About 42,000 Irish women are referred to symptomatic breast disease clinics each year, with about 2,500 to 3,000 of those likely to receive a subsequent diagnosis of breast cancer.

Professor Ó Laoide will tell the committee that roughly a quarter of all breast cancers can be preventable via “modifiable risk factors and environmental factors”.

Incidents of breast cancer in Ireland rose by about 2% each year between 1994 and 2008, with case rates having levelled off since then. Mortality rates have decreased in tandem, however, dropping 2% each year from 1994 through 2016.