Inadequate treatment is a killer

Thousands of concerned people will take to the street in Dublin today to highlight the fact that cancer is resulting in needless and preventable deaths because of inadequate equipment and facilities.

Under the umbrella of Cancer Care Alliance it will be the first time that families, interest groups, medical professionals and political parties will gather to demand that cancer care be made a priority.

The demand is that effective, timely, comprehensive and adequately funded care must be delivered at national and regional level. At the moment there are radiotherapy units in Cork and Dublin, and the further a patient lives from either centre, the greater the chance they will die.

It is untenable that anybody should suffer because of their geographical distance from either centre. The urgency of providing regional units is underlined by the fact that 20,000 new cases of cancer are recorded annually.

In this day and age it is unacceptable that cancer sufferers face delays of anything up to three months before receiving crucial and potentially life-saving treatment.

Although Health Minister Micheál Martin has announced BreastCheck is to be extended nationwide, the critical delivery of national breast screenings is still an immediate priority for the Coaltition.

Today’s march on the Dáil and Government Buildings should not be necessary because the facilities so urgently needed should have been put in place long before now. Unfortunately, they were not and consequently patients and their families all over the country have to endure a burden of worry which compounds the trauma of the illness itself.

Effective cancer care requires the co-ordination of surgery, radiotherapy and oncology, which lead to the best possible outcome.

They need to be addressed immediately, because there are insufficient beds available, day care and in-patient facilities are inadequate and there is a lack of oncology team staff.

So inadequate are the facilities for cancer care that one oncologist has estimated that approximately 1,000 patients die needlessly every year from lack of treatment.

If there was sufficient political will to prevent so many avoidable deaths, the funding would be provided by the Government to put in place the crucial units needed to fight this disease.