Richard Boyd Barrett calls for national radiotherapy replacement plan

It is good to be back and particularly good to be back in the aftermath of the successful campaign of Catherine Connolly and can I congratulate her in her position as our new president. It is also good to be back on the day that a socialist gets elected in New York, signs of hope and portents of the future. I hope you are not being a president. I hope. Certainly not. We might learn a few lessons from it though. I also just thank colleagues across the house for kind words today but also messages during, before and after my treatment and also to thousands of members of the public who sent very, very kind messages to me. They were really very, very heartening and very helpful. My biggest debt of gratitude is to the fantastic people who work in our health services and particularly in the cancer services, in my case St Luke's and the Eye and Ear Hospital. But there are similar people providing cancer services right across the country and they asked me to raise particular issues about the need to properly resource and support cancer services in this country. And it is important to say that everybody has a stake in that happening. Fifty percent, I didn't know this, but fifty percent of people will have an encounter with cancer during their lives. Perhaps 44,000 people this year will get a cancer diagnosis. The Irish Cancer Society made a whole series of requests pre-budget. It is still not clear about whether any of those have been met to fully fund and resource the national cancer strategy. But there is a very particular issue for me and for the people who provided me with the care in St Luke's in the area of radiation oncology machines. They are called linear accelerators. They basically have given me my life back and the staff, the infrastructure and so on. And fifty percent of those very high figures who get a cancer diagnosis each year will need these machines. But, fairly incredibly, thirty-five percent of those machines, which are supposed to be replaced every ten years, are now fifteen to seventeen years old. Forty percent will need to be replaced in the next five years. This means that there is a lot of discomfort and stress for patients and staff who need this life-saving treatment. The people who work in radiation oncology are asking for, and they have asked repeatedly for this, is for a national radiotherapy replacement programme where there is centralised oversight and procurement and where there is ring-fenced funding going forward, multi-annual funding, so they do not have to come each year with a begging bowl for money to provide this absolutely vital machinery to save lives. Thank you Deputy Minister. Thank you Deputy Boyd-Barratt and again just to welcome you back and to say I welcome the fact that you have raised issues relating to cancer services and the National Cancer Strategy. I think it is important just to take a step back and look at the progress that we have made over many years since the National Cancer Strategy was reduced. Over 65% of patients living five years after a cancer diagnosis compared to 43% in the 90s. I think a lot of the reforms which were introduced in previous years, difficult reforms by ministers at the time around centralisation of particular services, of hubs, has yielded much greater outcomes for citizens across our country. And like you I want to commend all of the workers across our hospital system who provide that daily care and compassion and support for people as they go through their treatment journey. What we have tried to do in recent years is to build and resource a public health system which responds to the needs from a workforce perspective. And that is why in the last five years we have nearly 30,000 additional healthcare workers in terms of whole time equivalence working in our public health system to support and rapidly respond to diagnosis or particular incidents as they arrive from cancer and a lot of other health perspectives. So next year we will have an allocation of over 27 billion in terms of the overall allocation overall allocation to the Department of Health. And what we are doing, and you asked specifically about radiation oncology which I will respond to, in my negotiations and engagement with Minister Carol MacNeill over the next five years from a capital perspective, we have over 9 billion euro of capital in our health system over the next five years. At a record level and what Minister Carol MacNeill is doing now is developing a sectoral investment plan working with the HSE on the capital needs in our system. Some of that will relate to radiation oncology or respective treatment interventions around replacing existing equipment. Others would relate to obviously new beds and building bed capacity across our system. But we as a government have prioritised funding our health system, funding more workers in our health system, more beds and also funding the technological improvements which I think will yield greater improvements in our life expectancy. And that is why we are taking digital health seriously and why we are prioritising that from a capital perspective over the next five years. So I will ask Minister Carol MacNeill to respond in time to your specific question and take a note of it in terms of the work that is happening on the capital plans for the next five years. But we have resourced and significantly reformed successive governments in our health system in terms of cancer treatment. And we are seeing the positive outputs from that and due to the great work of the people that you mentioned. The people who work who are professionals in this area say the following in the context of the budget. Radiotherapy services are operating significantly below capacity due to under resourcing. They go on, our health care staff do everything they can to minimise the impacts and care for patients. However, it is simply not possible to provide optimal care in these conditions. 16 of 24 working days last month were affected by unscheduled downtime because machines are breaking down because they are too old, putting stress on patients and staff. 23 million a year is spent on outsourcing to the private sector because of machines breaking down, not being replaced and the lack of a national replacement program where, as I said, doctors who should be providing from the services and the care to patients are instead, in their own words, coming looking to, you know, the minister, governments, departments, begging for the money, the resources and so on to replace the machines they need to provide the care to save lives. So you need to respond to the specific request to have a national program for the replacement of these machines and the staff and the infrastructure necessary to deliver it. I share with you the focus on ensuring that our health infrastructure in terms of radiation oncology machines or indeed building better bed capacity across our health system is achieved in the next five years. And that is the work that we are doing around the sector investment plan with the HSE to ensure that we replace the equipment that is required, that we build additional capacity and also to ensure that we, you know, we are funding a public health system now which should become less reliant on the private health system over the next series of years in terms of outsourcing and some of what you have referenced there. But I just want to commend the enormous work and leadership of many people in our health system who have transformed outcomes and it is important when we talk about the National Cancer Strategy it is a strategy that has worked, it is delivering improved outcomes and if you look at the data over two to three decades we have had a transformation and improvement in that over the last number of years. But I will ask Minister Carl MacNeill to respond to your specific question around radiation oncology. Thank you Minister. And I believe there is a significant scope over the next five years through the investment we put aside in the National Development Plan to have a significant replacement program for a lot of the health equipment which is required. Thank you Minister.