Prof Patrick Johnston is professor of oncology at Queen's University and a consultant medical oncologist at Belfast City Hospital.
"We must think of healthcare as a pathway for patients. How will they access the system, who will they see - this must become a smooth transition," he says from the perspective of a consultant who has helped to develop cancer services in Northern Ireland following publication of the landmark Calman/Hide report in the UK in 1996.
The NHS Cancer Plan of 2000 had its genesis in this 1996 report which identified the need for a multi-disciplinary team approach and the importance of major cancer centres and cancer units using a hub and spoke model throughout Britain.
In the North it took two years to retract services out of existing peripheral hospitals and into more centralised cancer units and a major cancer centre.
The Northern Ireland Cancer Centre, which is being developed at present, is in the campus of Belfast City Hospital but will be physically linked to the existing hospital building. With 84 in-patient beds, it will carry out a large volume of day hospital chemotherapy. Specialist surgical cancer teams will be located here as well.
The cancer centre will in turn link with cancer units in Derry, Antrim, Craigavon and the Ulster Hospital, where outpatient chemotherapy will be offered as well as local expertise in the common cancers such as breast and bowel.
According to Prof Johnston, the aim is that the patient seen in Derry will have the same quality of treatment with the same outcome as a patient treated in the Belfast City Cancer Centre. He is confident that this aim will become a reality within five years.
He believes the system does not have enough doctors for them to be involved in routine care.
"I see nurses as being the glue or cement which keeps health service delivery together and allows it to develop."
For example, nurses should be proactively given chemotherapy guidelines and allowed to draw the patients blood and give them their drugs according to a pre-arranged structure.
"Such a model allows us to say to politicians - give us X amount of money, we will deliver a given volume of treatments for this amount."