I thank the Deputy for raising this on World Cancer Day and thank him for continuing to be an advocate for cancer patients across the island. As the Deputy has said, he and I could speak about this for a good hour and not get through all of the different issues. We are well aware that every person in this room and the people whom we represent are impacted by cancer in their families, in their broader families and in their community. While we have made huge strides in cancer care since the first national cancer strategy was launched, where we had only 45% of people surviving five years in the nineties and that is up to 65% now, with our mortality rate falling faster than anywhere else in the EU, as the Deputy correctly points out, however, the number of diagnoses is going to continue to increase and the population is increasing. I attended the Irish Daffodil Day launch for the volunteers. The ambassador for the Irish Cancer Society this year is Katie Foley from Inch in Kerry. She is 30 and she has a four-year-old girl. Katie was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago. She runs her own business, a coffee shop. She has gone through a recovery process and is doing very well. She is ambassador this year. She has been speaking about the difficulty for every part of her life - looking after her little girl, looking after her business and getting the treatment that she needs. I highlight the example, as the Deputy has, of how it can impact so many young people. As we live longer and we are diagnosed with more illnesses, we should expect the rate of diagnosis to increase. That does not mean that we change anything that we are doing, but we need to be diagnosing and treating much more quickly. As we both know, what we are looking at now is a future of people living with and beyond different types of cancer for much longer than would previously have been the case because we have the technology and the types of drugs that can keep people living with cancer much longer than would have been the case, but that does not change the challenge for those people's lives. We have consciously chosen to invest in our cancer support programme, for example, Rose Rock House in Castlebar or ARC in Cork. We have given €5.5 million for the core funding of 21 centres around the country because they are providing therapeutic support, counselling support and psychosocial supports to people who are living with and beyond cancer, and those supports are just as important as every other element of the investment in our cancer strategy. This year, in the Department of Health we are evaluating the success of the ten-year cancer strategy which ends this year and beginning to do the work on devising the next one. We want to be unapologetically ambitious for what is possible because of what we have learnt, in particular, through technology. In relation to artificial intelligence, AI, we saw some really interesting work on that in the media today in relation to its use in diagnostics. We want to be unapologetically ambitious in terms of where people are getting their cancer treatment. For example, I visited Bantry and Cork University Hospital. Repeatedly, I see people being supported in their transport needs to get from Bantry to Cork University Hospital, on a Tuesday for a blood test and on a Wednesday for their infusion. I do not want them to have to travel from Bantry to CUH. I would like people to be able to get their treatment - their specialist diagnosis and plan for treatment in our specialist centres but, thereafter, for them to get their treatment at home or as close to home as possible, in Bantry or in their home, rather than taking the fairly arduous journey for a cancer patient of travelling that distance to CUH. These are the sorts of changes that we are trying to make through a reallocation of funding this year. It is a really important shift. The Deputy correctly identifies that there is too much variance in how people are treated around this country depending on where they happen to live and the type of cancer they happen to have, and that is not good enough. I want people in Donegal and Dublin to have the same equality of treatment. I want people in Cork to have the same treatment as the people in Galway and as the people in Tullamore, that they have the same expectation no matter what cancer they have that they will be diagnosed and treated in an equal way. We have not had the transparency previously of being able to assess which regions are meeting the standard and which are not. This new regional funding model enables us to put the 6% uplift that we have in the budget and the 3,300 people into the system and make sure that those resources are targeted in the most effective way to achieve a much better regional equality for people across this country.

Sentiment score: -0.10

I am here for the public system. I am here to invest in the public system and to champion the public system. A total of 80% of our cancer care gets delivered through the public system and that is my focus. The Deputy is correct to highlight the replacement programme in St. Luke's. I have updated the Deputy that there is a replacement equipment supply commencing in quarter 1, with a contractor in place this year. In quarter 4, we are also working on a detailed business case for the Beaumont phase 2 expansion. There is also work to be done in Cork and Galway. There is a particular difference with St. Luke's, but the work is progressing. The Deputy is quite right that it should have progressed before now. I highlight as well some of the other important developments that are happening more broadly. It is about machinery, treatment and additional staff. It is also about prevention programmes and screening programmes. We have recently announced the extension of the Laura Brennan HPV catch-up vaccination programme targeted at fifth and sixth years in schools. We would encourage anyone whose child, male or female, has not had that vaccination to get it where it is offered. We know it is most effective when a child is about 12 or 13, before they become in any way sexually active. Please take that vaccination if you can. It is there to try to eliminate cervical cancer. I am examining, with the screening control programme and NSAC, the opportunities to most effectively extend screening for bowel cancer in a way that is going to get the best for us. I am very conscious of the “do not attend” rate and the rate of participation for that. It is one of the reasons we have prioritised that for the pharmacy extension, and in the agreement that we have reached with pharmacists, who are now going to try to proactively register some of their patients on the bowel cancer screening programme in an effort to get more people onto that screening programme. Encouragingly, I met Professor Daniel Ryan from Beaumont this week regarding different options for lung screening and what opportunities may be there. We are not doing enough on lung cancer screening, particularly for those people who are not symptomatic or are very young. We are now able to pick that up much better than has been the case heretofore. The Deputy and I could speak about all of the different elements of cancer care, from vaccinations to screening to identification. We have to recognise the exceptional work that is being done at the research level in targeting and manipulating cancer cells in completely different ways, so people are living longer. This year is an exciting year to try to really drive forward with ambition with what we are going to do for the next ten years.

Sentiment score: 0.10