Time to end delays that cost lives - Cancer tests

In January 2007, a young mother known at first only as ‘Rosie’ revealed on the national airwaves that she had been handed a death sentence by the Irish health service.

Susie Long, a mother of two from Callan, Co Kilkenny, contacted Joe Duffy’s Liveline programme to say she was dying of bowel cancer as a result of having to wait eight months for a colonoscopy, a procedure used to detect it.

In an email, she highlighted that a private patient had received a colonoscopy within three days of seeing his GP, but she, as a public patient, had had to wait months.