Richard Boyd Barrett: Grateful survivor demands cancer reform

Thanks and thanks to Deputy Cullen and Sinn Féin for bringing forward this very important motion on cancer services which I'm very happy to support and I think it was about this time last year that I started, more or less to a year, I started my cancer treatment for throat cancer and the most important thing I want to say is that how grateful I am to all of those who work in cancer services from the doctors, to the nurses, to the radiotherapists, to the nutritionists, to the orderlies, to the porters, to the receptionists, to the people who research in the area of cancer who help develop the treatments, all of these huge numbers of people and a lot more probably I'm not mentioning because without them I might be standing here or I might be facing a, you know, a fairly bleak future but instead the treatment was successful and it was thanks to those amazing people and all the work they've done and so I'm very very grateful and given that 50% of the population will have a scrape of cancer to know that, you know, it's not a death sentence as maybe gone back not so long ago it was seen as such, the treatment is advancing all of the time if we catch it early ideally or it gets treated because if we invest and resource properly the people who work in this area support them and the research necessary and the equipment necessary and the capacity and resources then we can save a lot of lives and I'm certainly a major beneficiary of that. I think it is self-evident that I mean I'm not quite sure why the government have put down a counter motion to Sinn Féin's motion because they could certainly add things to it but I think Sinn Féin's motion is very reasonable in saying you know of course there shouldn't be a postcode lottery. Now I've had a very good experience I want to say but I also know it is it does vary around the country if particularly in your more rural parts of the country it can be very different. I wouldn't have liked about having to travel you know and I was lucky in that regard I went to St. Luke's or for that matter I wouldn't you know and okay I'm well paid so it doesn't matter so much but it like in St. Luke's you don't have to pay for parking where I went right but in St. Vincent's you do have to pay for parking and quite a lot you know that's sort of crazy to put financial obstacles in the way of people when they're actually in this sort of situation similar you know other financial obstacles for actually accessing if you don't have medical cards the you know you still have to pay some significant for some people the amount of money you have to pay we shouldn't have financial obstacles in the way of people when they're in this sort of when they're in this sort of situation so I agree with the motion and we need a cancer strategy for you know the next 10 years we need to resource that on a multi-annual basis so the certainty we need to have equipment replacement programs has already been referred to the linear accelerators ridiculous the age of them the vast majority of them are way past their sell-by date and that makes a big difference right I mean one of the things you you're affected by when you're getting the treatment is the collateral damage of the of the the treatment in terms of side effects but the the newer the machinery the more precise the treatment is and therefore it's better for actually dealing with the cancer but also lessens the impact of the side effects so this makes a real difference to the quality of life of people who get the treatment and to the precision of the treatment so we need to have that properly organized national equipment replacement scheme rather than it being done on an ad hoc basis a couple of other quick things I just want to say is senior radiation therapists should be on a senior pay scale a lot of the people who are qualified in this area are leaving the country because they don't have comparable pay rates to people in other parts of the country we also have a problem in that the eight PET scanners in this country only one of them are fully publicly funded to one partially right they're in the hands of private hands and the stuff that goes into PET CT scanners the only place where it's made is in Blackrock Clinic in a private clinic right which is ridiculous there shouldn't be that level of privatization of the means to produce PET scanners or PET scanners themselves and of the equipment because it raises questions if you like about equality of treatment when it's dealing with cancer there are many more things I could say but I'm out of time but hopefully the government are listening