Cancer inequality

A LEADING cancer specialist has warned that Ireland has a two-tier cancer care system, with poorer outcomes for

patients in the west and northwest of the country.

Consultant surgeon Professor Michael Kerin, director of the Cancer Managed Clinical Academic Network at the Saolta University Healthcare Group, told a cancer conference that Galway University Hospital is outdated and has inadequate facilities for cancer patients.

Professor Kerin further stated that the west and northwest region is the most rural area of the country, and suffers from economic deprivation and a poorer outcome for cancer patients.

The EU recognises this part of our country as a ‘lagging region’.

If a line were to be drawn across the country from Galway to Dublin, a cancer centre of excellence simply does not exist north of that line. Is this what balanced regional development and equality in good cancer care looks like?

There are sick people travelling from the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal to Galway on the ‘cancer bus’, enduring a 10 to 12-hour journey there and back for their vital life-saving treatments, at a hospital that is not fit for purpose and is seriously overcrowded.

If this happened anywhere else in the country there would be outrage and revolt. Where are our politicians in this whole unequal scenario?

The people of the west and northwest should be valued as equal citizens of our country, as referred to in the 1916 proclamation, and not as secondclass ‘culchies’ as is the case at the present time.